Abstract: Issues like trade are often considered too technical and low salience to appear in national debates, raising questions over the increasing supply of trade messages in campaign speeches. We develop a theoretical framework that explains where and when elites supply trade messages. Incumbent-party candidates avoid trade messages, even where doing so would win local support, while challengers use trade messages to strategically inform electorally competitive regions of trade’s local impacts. In aggregate, a minority of geographies are supplied one-sided trade information campaigns. Using a within-candidate design, we find empirical support using an original dataset covering all campaign rally speeches by presidential candidates from 2008 to 2024, which we geocode and analyze with semi-supervised text methods to quantify where presidential campaigns emphasize trade relative to other issues. Our results are robust to exogenous sources of local interests, pre-trends, and placebo tests using immigration messages. The findings clarify the supply-side origins of the globalization backlash during the understudied campaign stage.
Moderator: Iain Osgood