There were no cases of a “trade-sceptic” being replaced a “trade-friendly” member in either chamber.

Simon Evenett and Michael Meier have produced the race-by-race analysis that I briefly considered while writing this post before I set aside the project as too laborious.

Executive summary:

Tuesday’s U.S. Congressional elections assumed considerable importance for trade negotiators because it is thought that, even if significant progress were made on the Doha Round negotiations in early 2007, Congress would need to extend the U.S. President’s Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) to allow the Round to be completed. Much turns on how the newcomers to the U.S. House and Senate are expected to vote. In this note we examine the stance taken by the 62 individuals who won their elections to the House or Senate for the first time. We compared their stance on trade policy matters during their election campaigns with the incumbents that they will soon replace. Our analysis, therefore, takes account of every known case where a seat changed hands and not just the cases where a Democrat replaced a Republican office.

The degree of importance assigned to this increase in congressional hostility to trade liberalization depends upon one’s assessment of TPA renewal’s chances prior to the election. My Thursday post arguing that the electoral impact on trade liberalization would be small reflects my belief that TPA renewal has been out of the question for a while. Of course, we should be afraid that this increases the risk of protectionism.

In June 2004, I wrote a criticism of Bush’s “competitive liberalization” strategy that included the following paragraph:

The administration’s political capital is not only limited in regards to foreign trading partners – the US populace is likely to be unwilling to sign off on a large number of trade agreements. Congress will only pass a limited number of trade agreements before it becomes uncooperative, out of fear that it will be perceived as liberalizing too quickly. Pressure from protectionist constituents like steel workers has a significant impact upon political calculations. I perceive it as unlikely that free traders will have enough expendable political capital to win the swing votes required to pass both FTAA and Doha agreements in the same congressional session. The problems of domestic political capital also hint at another trouble feature of bilateral trade deals – they expose free trade advocates to lobbying and criticism from anti-trade organizations.

Evenett & Meier write:

This constitutes a major blow to the U.S. Administration’s trade strategy of “Competitive Liberalization.” Far from building a domestic political consensus behind trade reform, as USTR Zeollick had originally hoped, this strategy has probably created the seeds of its own destruction.

I am happy that I was right, but not really.

(To be fair to Zoellick, the strategy was sold as a means to stimulate international movement towards liberalization, not build a domestic political consensus.)

[Massive hat tip to Ben Muse]