Presidential candidates only care about your local economy if the race is neck-and-neck—otherwise, they’re just reading from a script.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Commerce and Campaigns: The Local Roots of Globalization Messaging in US Presidential Speeches
SSRN · 5599992
The Takeaway
Analyzing 16 years of geocoded speeches, researchers found that politicians only talk about local jobs and trade when they face intense party competition. Without a tight race, they become 'unresponsive' to the local economy and pivot to generic immigration rhetoric, even in areas where migration has no measurable impact.
From the abstract
Why has trade and immigration policy risen to the top of the national agenda? A heated debate between voter-and elite-driven theories continues in large part due to limited data on elite behavior. We introduce an original dataset covering the universe of campaign speeches by presidential candidates from 2008 to 2024, which we geocode and analyze with semi-supervised text methods to quantify where presidential campaigns emphasize trade and migration policy. We develop a general theory to predict