When Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016, there was not much love for tariffs in Washington. Many Republicans and Democrats believed that putting levies on imports created economic inefficiencies and that freer trade was the best recipe for growth.
That view has largely fallen out of fashion in 2024. While Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, differ greatly in their campaign proposals, both of their parties are increasingly embracing tariffs as an essential tool in protecting American manufacturers from Chinese and other global competitors.
It has been a sharp reversal from previous decades, in which most politicians fought to lower tariffs, rather than raise them. But the loss of American manufacturing jobs as a result of globalization and China’s focus on churning out cheap exports have created a bipartisan backlash against more open trade. Given that Mr. Trump’s 2016 win capitalized on such sentiments, Democrats have been striving to avoid losing voters opposed to free trade.
“On economic policy and trade issues, you have both major parties moving in the same direction,” said Nick Iacovella, a senior vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates in favor of tariffs and domestic investments in industry.
Mr. Iacovella said that Mr. Trump would most likely go further on tariffs than Ms. Harris would, but no matter who wins the election “it’s still going to be a tariffs administration, and an industrial policy one.”
Ms. Harris has sought to differentiate herself from Mr. Trump’s trade proposals, which include tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on most imports, as well as levies of more than 60 percent on China. Many economists say that level of tariffs would drive up prices for consumers, since companies would likely pass on higher import costs.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, Ms. Harris described the proposals as “a national sales tax — call it a Trump tax” and said the plans “would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.”
Economists’ estimates vary, but the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund calculated that the tariffs could increase costs on a middle-income family by $3,900 per year.
Ms. Harris has not said much about how she would approach tariffs, including whether she would impose additional levies on China. But Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement that Ms. Harris would “employ targeted and strategic tariffs to support American workers, strengthen our economy, and hold our adversaries accountable.”
Despite early criticisms of Mr. Trump’s trade policy, the Biden administration has kept the former president’s initial tariffs on China in place and proposed adding another $18 billion of new levies on some Chinese products, including a 100 percent tax on electric vehicles. The administration also proposed new tariffs on electric vehicle batteries, semiconductors, steel and medical products, in an effort to ensure that newly invested American factories can stay in business.
The Biden administration is set to issue its final determination on those levies before the end of August. Last month, it also imposed additional tariffs on certain metals from Mexico, seeking to block Chinese materials from a route into the United States.
Inu Manak, a trade policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that politicians of both parties were now more willing to argue that they could increase tariffs without any negative effects. She pointed to a recent poll by the Cato Institute, which showed that Republicans and Democrats had high levels of support for hypothetical tariffs imposed by their party, but not the other party.
“When Harris criticizes Trump, she’s not criticizing tariff policy, she’s criticizing his tariff policy,” Ms. Manak said. “And I’m sure if she proposed something, Democrats would think that’s great.”
The tariffs that Mr. Trump has floated are orders of magnitude larger than what President Biden’s administration has proposed, presumably covering more than $3 trillion of trade, and implying a much bigger impact on the economy.
In addition to a universal tariff on all imports and higher tariffs on China, he has suggested a reciprocal policy in which the United States will match tariffs that another nation imposes on American exports.
Speaking in Asheville, N.C., last week, Mr. Trump said he might double the 10 percent tariff he had already proposed on most foreign goods.
“We are going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years,” he told the crowd.
Economists generally agree that tariffs of this size would have a noticeable effect on consumer prices, while also raising costs for manufacturers that buy imported parts or materials. About a third of U.S. imports are inputs that go into American farms and factories.
Large tariffs could also incite retaliation from foreign countries, kicking off a damaging trade war. Earlier this year, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said that a 10 percent American import tariff could lead to a “free-for-all which would upend the stability and predictability of trade.”
Mary Lovely, an economist at the Peterson Institute, said that tariffs seemed to be the “solution de jour — a supposed remedy for a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, left-behind communities, and income inequality.”
“Unfortunately, tariffs remedy none of these ills and, sadly, higher tariffs will make them worse,” Ms. Lovely said.
But the tariffs have proved popular with industries that have faced stiff competition from Chinese firms, like makers of kitchen cabinets. Paul Wellborn, the president of Wellborn Cabinet, a manufacturer of kitchen and bath cabinets in Ashland, Ala., credited tariffs with saving his company and the industry.
Wellborn Cabinet saw its sales fall after the Great Recession, when the housing market collapsed and with it demand for new cabinets. But as the economy started to recover, business was still slow, Mr. Wellborn said. The industry realized that Chinese companies had taken over about 40 percent of the market and their share was continuing to grow.
Wellborn Cabinet joined with others in its industry to mount an investigation into Chinese trade practices, which resulted in tariffs ranging from 4 percent to nearly 300 percent on Chinese cabinets. The industry was further helped as Mr. Trump added first 10 percent and then an additional 15 percent of tariffs on top.
“He’s right on the money as far as tariffs,” Mr. Wellborn said of Mr. Trump.
Other companies have been more critical. Thomas Shaw, the founder of Retractable Technologies, a maker of syringes, said he supported tariffs and American manufacturing, but that the government had not given his company time to relocate before imposing the levies.
The company makes some of its syringes and needles in a plant in Little Elm, Texas, while making others in China. Mr. Shaw claimed he had been blocked from producing more in the United States by anti-competitive behavior, and had been forced to go to China to manufacture what he described as an innovative product that had reduced needle sticks for nurses and helped the government deploy vaccines during the pandemic.
This year, the Biden administration said it would give the company only a few months before a 50 percent tariff on Chinese syringes went into effect, which was an unrealistically short period to move a factory around the world, he said.
“We were forced to go to China, and now with the tariff we’re being forced to go back,” he said. “What it’s doing is it is making it more difficult for us every day.”
Even if tariffs cause certain economic duress, they may still be a winning formula politically. One study put out earlier this year by a prominent group of economists, for example, found that Mr. Trump’s China tariffs had little effect on employment in the industries protected by the tariffs. But politically, they were a success, resulting in more support for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party in the affected areas.
“Some of the support it creates for Republicans might be due to the fact that people appreciate the government reacting to, standing up to China,” David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview earlier this year.