Are Democrats Now the Party of Free Markets? Don’t Bet on It.

Here’s a fact about partisanship and public opinion that may surprise you: According to Gallup, Democrats have been warming toward foreign trade since 2008, and they have been more positive about it than Republicans have been since 2012. With all the talk of political realignment in recent years, data points like these have led some to wonder whether Democrats are becoming the major party that better aligns with libertarian commitments to free markets and limited government.

That case could certainly be made. Another recent Gallup poll found that, for the first time in almost 20 years, Democrats are more concerned than Republicans about government overreach. Asked whether the federal government has too much power, about the right amount of power, or too little power, 62 percent of Americans say it has too much. That includes 66 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners, compared to 58 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners.

Republicans are still much more likely than Democrats to think the government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses (81 percent vs. 31 percent), while Democrats are much more likely to think the government should do more to solve our country’s problems (62 percent vs. 17 percent). Yet most Americans with a household income of $40,000 or less say government should be doing more, which is relevant because President Donald Trump edged out former Vice President Kamala Harris among lower-income voters in the 2024 election, according to exit polls.

During the last three presidential cycles, Americans without a college degree have shifted toward Trump, while more highly educated Americans have broken decidedly for Democrats. Those trends have caused many observers to posit that the GOP is now the “working-class party.”

If working-class voters are more favorable toward government action, it is reasonable to wonder whether that demographic change could lead to an ideological change, with the Republican Party in years to come following Trump by embracing deficit spending, industrial policy, tariffs, and other interventions in the economy. Meanwhile, the rise of “abundance liberals”—left-of-center policy wonks who have belatedly realized that overregulation and interest-group politics are making us all poorer—raises the possibility that the Democratic Party is on the opposite trajectory.

A 2025 podcast conversation between former Daily Show host Jon Stewart and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein exemplified the latter flavor of policy evolution. Klein spent a chunk of the episode walking through the endless maze of sometimes-conflicting, always-onerous mandates attached to federal spending: requirements that subsidized factories use costly green energy sources, jump through hoops to diversify their workforces, provide on-site child care, and so on. When you add complications such as comment periods, challenge periods, and the convoluted stages of the application process, it’s no wonder that President Joe Biden’s efforts to jump-start infrastructure investment or “reshore” manufacturing found little success.

“And also, by the way, it’s going to make it impossible for anyone other than larger corporations to comply,” Stewart observed, because “smaller, more agile, more local businesses….would not have the manpower, the financial resources. You are excluding an enormous amount of the American economy in terms of building things by laying on compliance costs that would drive most companies into the ground.”

Listening to two prominent progressives highlight the cronyism and inefficiencies of government bureaucracy that libertarians have been shouting about for decades was equal parts refreshing and infuriating. But if you were tempted to hope those realizations would bring them around to genuinely libertarian conclusions, you would be disappointed.

Ultimately, as the second half of the podcast made clear, Klein and his allies support streamlining government because they hope to make it easier for government to do big, ambitious things: nationwide high-speed rail, federal housing projects, Medicare for All. They are not trying to get government out of the way so people can thrive; they want government itself to thrive.

That distinction is the main problem with the hypothesis that Democrats will soon be the party of free markets and limited government. Even the abundance movement—the most libertarian-coded segment of the larger Democratic coalition—wants “a much stronger government,” in Klein’s words. And the less libertarian elements of the party—think of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who favors government-run grocery stores and free public transit—are busy pulling their party in the opposite of a free market direction.

Sure, a recent Pew Research Center survey found 87 percent of Democrats saying Trump’s protectionism would have a mostly negative effect on the country. But a lot of that seems to be negative polarization: Democrats oppose the tariffs because they dislike the guy imposing them, not because they have a principled commitment to free markets and free trade. Biden ran in 2020 as a critic of Trump’s reckless first-term tariffs. Once in office, he kept many of them and even expanded some.

Democrats frequently discover a strange new respect for limited-government ideals when they’re not in power, but it doesn’t last. The moment they’re back in the White House, expect progressives to experience sudden-onset amnesia about the lessons they weren’t really learning during the Trump years.