THE NUMBERS: Incumbent party losses –
|
1930 |
2026 |
|
|
House |
-49 |
-45? |
|
Senate |
-5 |
-8? |
|
Governors |
-9 |
-5? |
Poli sci pioneer E.E. Schattschneider’s “Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff,” a 1935 study of the “Smoot-Hawley” tariff bill — technically the Tariff Act of 1930, signed by Herbert Hoover in June of 1930 — remains a classic analysis of lobbying, interest group politics, and American ‘policymaking’ at close range. His close, though, went wildly wrong:
“The history of the American tariff is the story of a dubious economic policy turned into a great political success. … [N]early all important opposition has for the time being disappeared. A survey of the pressure politics of the [bill] shows no significant concentration of forced able to reverse the policy and bring about a return to a system of low tariffs. … The very tendencies that have made the legislation bad have made it politically invincible.”
Hoover, the last president until Mr. Trump to defend a general tariff increase in a “midterm” election, got a wipeout five months after signing this bill. His Republicans dropped 49 House seats, 5 Senate seats, and 9 governorships. The actual tariffs held on for the balance of Hoover’s term, but as Schattschneider was writing his book, the Roosevelt administration’s “Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act” was already unraveling them.
The Tariff Act of 1930 differed in a lot of technical respects from Mr. Trump’s tariff decrees (see below), but data kept by the U.S. International Trade Commission show that the two bottom-line rate increases are very close. Between 1929 and 1933, “trade-weighted average” tariffs rose by about 6.3% (from 13.5% to 19.8%). From 2024 to 2025, they rose by 5.5% (from 2.3% to 7.8%). The political denouement likewise: Mr. Trump’s 2026 Republicans lost even more Senate seats than Hoover’s 1930 group (six to eight, with two still uncalled this morning), and —while starting with 218 House seats as opposed to Hoover’s 265 — nearly as many House seats.
The parallel outcomes suggest where Schattschneider went wrong. Basically, he didn’t so much overrate the importance of inside-game lobbying as fail to see that sometimes big-picture democracy and public opinion overwhelm it. Thinking about tariffs through the lens of interest-group politics, he concluded that while tariffs are negative for the economy in general, their “benefits to an individual producer are obvious while many of the costs are obscure.” He thus found businesses, trade associations, and labor groups passionately interested in the few tariff lines that might give them visible advantages, and less engaged with the many lines that might incrementally work against them. Though the Smoot-Hawley bill was generally unpopular, most people felt it was confusing and weren’t very active about it, so public opinion didn’t much affect the outcome. Thus the conclusion that what really counts in American policymaking is not the views of the public in general, but coordinated interest-group activity.
Sometimes that’s probably right. Other times not: when the public is genuinely moved it is far more powerful than interest-group coalitions. That was the case in 1930, as public alarm over the Depression’s first year and a strong view that Hoover’s tariff increase had made it worse created the “important opposition” Schattschneider thought non-existent. He just didn’t see it, because he was looking at the wrong things. That seems to have happened in 2026 as well. Just as the 1930 public decided tariff increases were making the Depression worse, the 2026 public responded to (a) the Trump administration’s decision in early 2025 to abandon its promise to “defeat inflation and quickly bring down all prices” and instead push prices up by embarking on a Hoover-like general tariff increase, (b) justify this in inflammatory terms by arguing that “cheap goods are not part of the American dream”, “two dolls are enough” for a girl, etc., and (c) constantly claim that a tariff-driven industrial boom was either in full swing or just around the corner. Very obviously, the public concluded that the Trump decrees had broken a promise and reignited inflation, didn’t share the administration’s indifference to the prices of goods, and hasn’t seen an industrial boom. Hence the outcome.
As to the future, Roosevelt’s New Deal administration found a creative way to dismantle the Smoot-Hawley bill through international negotiations, and by 1940 tariff rates were below pre-S.-H. levels again. Undoing Mr. Trump’s tariff program is (at least in principle) much easier, since it has come in the form of a series of constantly changing decrees rather than a durable, constitutionally legitimate law. The incoming Congress can repeal them, and the next president can cancel them as easily as Mr. Trump signed them.
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Tariff decrees reprise:
Trump admin.’s April 2, 2025 “international emergency” tariff decree.
U.S. Commerce Department (August, 2025) declares that condensed milk, balance beams, mosquito repellent, & other products are “steel or aluminum derivative products.”
Supreme Court strikes down the “international emergency” decree.
U.S. Trade Representative Office replaces it with 10.0% to 12.5% tariffs on goods from the top 60 U.S. trading partners, claiming that all of them are probably buying forced-labor goods & this is imposing a burden on U.S. commerce.
PPI’s Amicus curiae brief points out that the new decree doesn’t actually show any trade in forced labor at all.
And a look back:
Pres. Hoover launches and signs the Tariff Act of 1930.
Schachtschneider’s Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff (1935), out of print but available via the Internet Archive. It can get a bit dense …
“A more just estimate of the extent of the opposition to Paragraph 5 may now be made. It is observed that, of the 1,500 items in it, the duties on precipitated bone phosphate and barium oxide alone were opposed by name, while only two domestic manufacturers of pharmaceutical supplies and one importer appeared against the paragraph generally… The cement industry declared in its brief that ‘The undersigned American manufacturers of Portland cement, representing approximately 94 independent companies with 157 active plants in 32 states, as that an adequate tariff duty be placed on Portland cement,’” etc.
Douglas Irwin’s concise modern account, Peddling Protectionism (2011), covers Hoover and Congress, international reactions, and assessments of the economic impact.
PPI’s Ed Gresser, speaking at the Cosmos Club last fall, does a compare-and-contrast of the tariff binges of 1930 and 2025. Bonus, quick snapshots of Rep.Willis Hawley, Sen. Reed Smoot, and a second-tier Tariff Act issue:
“Hawley was a stocky, burly-looking individual and something of an intellectual. He was President of Willamette College in Oregon before going to Congress, owned an original copy of Hugo Grotius’ 17th -century international law compendium, and taught political science. Smoot was more tall and thin, and based on photographs he had a kind of “gloomy undertaker” look. A journalist at the time said he “spoke with a dry holy passion for financial soundness,” and he had a strong interest in public morals. One of the secondary issues in the Senate’s 1930 tariff-bill debate was an amendment by a group of relatively ‘left’ or liberal Senators to dial back the Customs Service’s power to search incoming international mail for indecent material. Smoot was very much against that, and threatened to read passages from the D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the Senate floor to demonstrate the danger Americans were facing.”
And Franklin Roosevelt (1934) winds it all down as he launches tariff-cutting negotiations via the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
