A while back, Good Authority contributor Alexander Kustov wrote the definitive explainer of thermostatic politics. Here’s the shorthand: The public often reacts against the policies being pushed by a president’s party – just like how a thermostat warms a room when it’s too cold or cools a room when it’s too hot.
Right now, Trump is telling Americans that trade is a threat to the U.S. economy. But increasingly Americans disagree. You can see this in Gallup polling from early February, just after Trump initially imposed tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China and then paused the tariffs on Mexico and Canada:
When Trump was running in 2024, about 60% of the public already had a favorable view of trade. But now 81% see trade as an opportunity for economic growth, not a threat.
The graph also shows that the exact same thing happened in Trump’s first term. Trump came into office in 2017 after criticizing global trade. But his presidency made Americans like trade more.
Interestingly, the increase in Americans’ support for trade between 2024 and 2025 is happening in both parties:
But perhaps the motives of the two parties are different. For Republicans, the increase could reflect their belief that, unlike under Biden, trade will be good under Trump. For Democrats it could be a reaction against Trump’s rhetoric.
Other polling suggests, however, that the thermostatic pattern is more evident on the left. Polling by the Polarization Research Laboratory asks a different question about trade: a scale where respondents place them somewhere between an anti-trade position (limiting imports to protect U.S. jobs) and a pro-trade position (allowing free trade to keep prices low).
Political scientist Tom Wood broke the results down by people’s self-reported ideology. The people moving most strongly against Trump are liberals:
Particularly interesting is that liberals became more pro-trade even before Trump took office. It’s similar to when partisans’ views of the economy change before a new president is inaugurated.
Here’s the takeaway. It’s easy to imagine that presidential candidates win because the public wants what they’re proposing to do. That’s why the winner and the winner’s party claim a “mandate.”
In reality, it’s basically the opposite. Americans didn’t necessarily want what the candidate was proposing to do. And once the new president is in the White House and does it, they want it even less.
