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IF THE Democrats win back the House of Representatives today, that is the end of the enthusiasm in the US for free-trade deals — to its own cost, to that of developing countries and, most certainly, to Europe.

Not that enthusiasm has been high. The Administration, to its credit, has been keen on free trade, but has pushed it with failing energy at an unwilling and distracted Congress.

The bigger problem is that across the US there is growing opposition to trade deals, from people who feel that they lie on the wrong side of globalisation.

In neither the Republican nor Democrat leadership is there a sign of the drive to buy back this support, which would be needed if free-trade policies are ever to revive.

The first casualty would be President Bush’s “fast-track” negotiating power, which gives him congressional authorisation to conclude trade deals. It runs out next summer and a Democratic House would almost certainly not renew it.

With that goes any chance of the US helping to revive the Doha round of world trade talks, although they may be dead anyway. Those carried the hope that the US might wean itself off farm subsidies — and force Europe to do the same.

The new Farm Bill, which is hovering over Congress until the election dust has settled, redresses some of the grotesque lavishness of Bush’s $190 billion (£99 billion) package in 2002 — but might have gone further had Doha been alive.

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think-tank, points out that it used to be unions who were the main, organised opposition to free-trade agreements. But now, a much wider group of people feel that their jobs are under threat from globalisation.

“The outsourcing panic created a deep impression,” he says, even though the numbers directly affected by the loss of these jobs were comparatively small — in the hundreds of thousands. The dismay at globalisation is something of a paradox, as it has risen during a period when the US economy has been growing strongly (and has expanded by a quarter in the past eight years).

But wages for a large slice of the US workforce have stayed the same in that period, or have fallen by several percentage points. Rising property values, for some, have cushioned the blow.

Insecurity about jobs has risen; so has resentment of widening income inequality. Polls show that Americans are less confident that hard work may put them at the top of the tree, and more fear that their children will be less well off.

Suspicion of free-trade pacts has hardly been less strong in the Republican-controlled Congress in the past couple of years.

The White House has held at bay some of the worst protectionist assaults on China, the perennial scapegoat. Bush has, however, signed the Bill authorising the 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

It is supposed to represent the determination of Congress to fight illegal immigration, but it has been criticised widely as ineffective and no more than a concession to protectionist reflexes.

The sentiments are so widespread that, short of a sustained drive to reassure those voters who believe that they are on the losing side of these trends, it is hard to see them reversing. That is not, however, the language in which these elections have been fought.

Follow the exit polls and get the results by using our Insomniac's TV Guide

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