Why Jared Polis Wants Democrats to Campaign on Free Trade

DENVER — A decade ago, only a fairly small group of congressional Democrats voted to support President Barack Obama’s free trade agenda. Protectionism was on the rise, helping fuel the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most of the “yes” votes for Obama’s trade program were Republicans.

One of the Democratic yes votes, Jared Polis, is now the governor of Colorado. And he believes a change of the political tides is at hand.

“The time is right for Democrats to lead again on trade,” Polis told me in an interview at the Colorado state capital here.

Polis thinks it’s about time that his compatriots started talking about the economic benefits of doing more business across borders. He also argues that Democrats should have taken up the anti-tariff mantle last year, when Trump repeatedly ran on jacking up rates.

“He was fairly open about his desire to impose heavy taxes on everyday household items that would increase their cost,” Polis said. “And we should have hit him harder on it.”

They’re hitting him now.

Democrats across the country are going all-in on attacking Trump’s global tariffs as they aim to convince voters that they’re serious about tackling the high cost of living. And they are increasingly making their opposition to this president’s trade policy a central piece of their strategy for the midterm elections.

It’s a pretty remarkable stance for a party that hasn’t always been high on removing barriers to trade, focusing instead on protecting American workers.

It’s not hard to see why they sense an opening: Roughly two-thirds of Americans, who are now much more educated about what tariffs are, don’t like what Trump is doing with them, and affordability has been a potent issue since the inflation spike that peaked in 2022 under President Joe Biden.

But it could also be the early stages of a sea change in how the party approaches trade.

For many years, protectionism was on the rise among Democrats. Under pressure from the left in the 2016 election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a key architect of Obama’s diplomatic pivot toward Asia, repudiated his plan for a free-trade alliance in the region. When Biden came to office, he and his aides promised not to roll back Trump’s first-term tariffs, but rather to revise and refine them.

Democrats have a simpler message now: Tariffs are making stuff more expensive.

“It’s hurting consumers. It’s hurting small businesses,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who leads campaign efforts for House Democrats, told me.

Democrats are not yet going full throttle on pushing for free trade in the way Polis might like. But they’ve grown pretty unequivocal about the ills of Trump’s world trade war. After all, it’s a relatively straightforward policy to propose a rollback of the tariffs, as well as easy shorthand for saying the party is focused on affordability.

And there are signs this messaging will linger even after the 2026 midterms.

Josh Shapiro, the governor of manufacturing-friendly Pennsylvania and a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, is using stark language to talk about tariffs to people in his home state: “A tariff is a tax, and it increases the price for consumers and for businesses.”

Shapiro made this point in Northampton County — historically a steel region — earlier this year, using craft beer as an example.

“When aluminum is harder to find or more expensive to buy, that drives up the cost of producing your favorite local beer,” he said. “And it’s not just the can that that beer comes in. It’s how the beer itself is made and brewed, the vats that are used in order to process that beer well. They’re made of steel. Steel is now subject to additional tariffs, additional tax.”

His remarks fit a theme I’ve heard in conversations with both politicians and activists: Globalization as a bogeyman has lost some of its political allure. It’s been replaced with an emphasis on the cost of living.

One prominent progressive operative said Democratic candidates were unlikely to run on support for tariffs as an economic tool anytime soon, pointing to negative polling on the levies as evidence that Trump’s electoral successes were much more about, well, Trump than enthusiastic support for his trade agenda.

“This moment has laid bare the fact that labor overstated the popular support for their policies on trade for a long time,” the operative said. “It seems pretty clear that Americans want low prices.”

(Even the AFL-CIO, the largest labor organization in the U.S., which maintains its support for import taxes as a tool, has criticized “tariffs for the sake of tariffs.”)

But where this all settles is still an open question. Taxes on imports have pushed up inflation, but not dramatically so, as many U.S. companies have chosen to eat the cost while they weather the yo-yo of tariff rates under Trump.

A White House official argued that Democrats would find less purchase with their anti-Trump-tariff messaging next year because that’s when the president’s manufacturing push will start to bear visible fruit.

“There’s a lot of talk about the negatives because they’re upfront, while the positives are backloaded,” the official told me.

There’s an irony in this complaint. It sounds a bit like the lamentations of Democrats during the Biden administration, who felt voters weren’t giving them enough credit for passing sweeping but slow-moving industrial policies to support high-tech and clean-energy manufacturing.

But the Trump White House official — like the Biden officials of the past — has a point. Building factories can take years (if they materialize at all).

In that same vein, it’s no easy bet that things will look better ahead of the midterm elections. More price increases could roll out over the next year or two, as companies probe what customers are willing to pay and weigh that against what they need to make a profit.

Ultimately, the magnitude of any effect from tariffs is still pretty uncertain, and the extent to which they boost inflation and hurt the labor market — or not — will have huge political implications.

“We’re in uncharted waters in the sense that we have a tariff policy which is much broader than anything I’m aware of in recent American history,” said former Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who ran on his protectionist bona fides in 2024, a race he lost to Sen. Dave McCormick. “The interplay between that and prices is still playing out.”

And despite Polis’ hopes, some Democrats are still leaving open pathways to supporting certain tariffs in the future, using adjectives like “chaotic” or “sweeping” to condemn the import taxes put in place by Trump, suggesting they might still welcome a more targeted approach for particular industries.

“Donald Trump has imposed tariffs on virtually every country, on virtually every product they make, and he has raised those tariffs, lowered those tariffs, raised those tariffs, delayed those tariffs,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who long resisted the kind of free trade deals that dominated U.S. policy pre-Trump, told me earlier this year. “That’s not a coherent tariff policy.”

Democrats aren’t exactly selling a specific vision for trade if they regain power, beyond scrapping this year’s high tariffs.

But for now, Trump has given them at least a partial economic message to unite around.

It’s a message, Polis notes, that has worked for Democrats in the past.

“We had leaders at the presidential level that leaned into trade: President Clinton, President Obama,” Polis said. “Unfortunately, Joe Biden wasn’t that kind of president.”