With trade in the news this week — Senate Democrats just blocked a vote on a trade bill favored by President Obama — I was curious about trends in public opinion about trade. My AEI colleague Heather Sims directed me to two recent round-ups of data on the subject, one from Gallup and one from AEI.

The good news, if you’re a free trader, is that the public does not seem to be turning against trade. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs asks whether globalization is “mostly good or mostly bad for the United States,” and the public has been tilting toward good and away from bad since the trough of the recession. Americans side with “good” by a larger margin now than they did in the late 1990s (the last time a Democratic president was getting rebuffed by his congressional party on trade promotion authority): There’s a 65–34 percent split now, where there was a 54–24 percent split then. The same trend can be seen in Gallup’s question about whether trade is mostly an opportunity for the U.S. economy or a threat to it: “Opportunity” is up and “threat” down since the recession trough, and a larger majority sides with opportunity now than in the 1990s.

The Chicago Council finds that Republicans, Democrats, and independents are all more pro-globalization than they were in the late 1990s. The Gallup numbers aren’t broken down by party that far back: They find that Democrats and independents are markedly more likely to see trade as an opportunity than they were in 2001, while Republicans are slightly less likely.

The public, then, does not seem to be taking a protectionist turn, and neither do voters in either party. I don’t think Republican politicians are moving in a protectionist direction, either. Most of the criticisms of trade promotion authority I’ve seen — those of Bobby Jindal and Carly Fiorina, for example — are based on the idea that it grants too much power to Obama.