Conventional wisdom holds that American elections rarely hinge on foreign policy. Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris has made the issue a centerpiece of the campaign, and indeed, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 81 percent of registered voters considered the economy by far their top concern.
But foreign policy isn’t absent from voters’ minds either, with 62 percent of respondents calling it “very important” to their vote. Two top-of-mind issues that are typically coded as domestic—the economy and immigration—are in fact deeply linked to developments around the rest of the world. And while there are some similarities between the two candidates’ foreign policies, there are important differences, including the extent to which the U.S. might exercise international leadership and the way it might engage with the rest of the world.
The salience of foreign policy was driven home for me during the series of in-depth, nonpartisan conversations that the Council on Foreign Relations hosted in four pivotal states over the course of October. In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, it was clear just how connected these states were to the rest of the world. And even though the audiences self-selected for interest in foreign policy, I came away struck by how the issue seemed anything but remote.
Consider Arizona, where I joined our panel discussion at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, in Phoenix. Arizona is a major trading state, exporting nearly $30 billion in goods annually, and ranks first in the country as a destination for foreign investment. It’s also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the recent shift toward onshoring the production of strategically important goods—namely, semiconductor chips. On the outskirts of Phoenix, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, helped by a grant from the CHIPS and Science Act, is adding two more factories to its existing facility, which is already producing cutting-edge processors for iPhones.
The Arizonans I met were also very much aware of the importance of immigration and agricultural exports to their state’s economy. They had a keen sense of how the U.S.-Mexican and the U.S.-Chinese relationships affected them.
In the other states—Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—the picture was decidedly more mixed. Each has endured the effects of deindustrialization, and all are experiencing pockets of economic revitalization. To state the obvious, there is significant variability across the U.S. economy, which results in similarly divergent attitudes about the United States’ role in the global economy.
Other global issues clearly matter to voters as well. At Grand Valley State University, in Allendale, Michigan—the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans—many in the audience wanted to hear about the Israel-Hamas war. At Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—the No. 2 natural-gas-producing state in the country—energy was high on the list.
These conversations only reaffirmed my belief that what happens in the rest of the world bears directly on Americans’ lives, and that those who live in the “Acela corridor” can benefit greatly from hearing the perspectives of those who don’t.
Too little has been done over decades to make an effective case for U.S. leadership, but it is not just a problem of communication. Washington also needs to do more to ensure that the benefits of the global economy are broadly shared. Whatever foreign policies it pursues must be accompanied by domestic policies that equip Americans with the skills they need to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world, whether the change comes from technology, immigration, or trade.
This effort should rank high on the next president’s agenda—no matter who wins next week’s election.
