This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 13th, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

New polling out from Cato details how Americans feel about protecting American jobs with

tariffs, about buy American idealism, and it also shows how opinions shift substantially

when those same Americans learn basic facts about how tariffs work and

how their pocketbooks might be affected.

Cato Scott Linscombe and Emily Ekins detail the results and explain what that ought to mean for defenders of freedom.

Trade has long been a salient issue for Americans especially in presidential election years because presidents often do have

sort of outsized authority when it comes to negotiating trade deals often depending on the

president and then who controls Congress. In this election year in particular

we have two candidates who they're not going to make the fourth right case for the broad benefits of trade to say the least.

And in the case of Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, it seems that they're

presenting a lot of information about trade in what I would

term fanciful ways about what the costs and benefits of robust trade might be. So Scott helped me get a sense of like where these

candidates at least rhetorically in public come down on trade and why you wanted to conduct a poll to understand

Americans views better. Sure, free trade is all costs and no benefits and

protectionism is all benefits and no costs.

And that narrative has been around for a few years now for sure

and was one of the motivations of why we launched our defending globalization project

to get it, you know, the facts and analysis. But we wanted to also get at what Americans really think

about these issues. And unfortunately unfortunately a lot of the public polling that's out there

doesn't do a very good job of probing not just the top line views on international trade and and those types of things,

but then asking more about trade-offs and confronting people with facts or

...