Sen. Bernie Sanders is telling Democratic voters that front-runner Joe Biden’s modestly pro-free trade stance makes him unelectable against President Trump.
In interviews and stump speeches over the last week, Sanders’s campaign has said that Biden’s 1993 vote as a Delaware senator in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement will give the president an edge in crucial Midwest states where manufacturing has suffered and where trade deals are often blamed.
In effect, Sanders, who opposed NAFTA as a Vermont congressman, is saying that Trump will steal his own line of attack against Biden and that it will work better for the president. The Vermont senator told the San Francisco Chronicle, “What do you think Trump will do with him in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin? He’ll decimate him on that issue.”
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, said on Thursday that Biden pushed “disastrous” trade deals and that “Trump will exploit that vulnerability in an effort to obscure his own record and win the battleground states that could swing the general election.” Shakir made the comment in response to a comment by Trump on Thursday that attacked Biden on NAFTA: “He approved it. He was pushing it. It’s the worst trade deal ever made. We’re terminating NAFTA.”
It’s a line of attack Sanders himself often uses against Biden. “Decimated” was the title of an attack ad that Sanders rolled out on Wednesday that featured an auto union factory worker praising Sanders as the only candidate that “has consistently opposed every disastrous trade deal.” The ad also showed Biden defending his NAFTA vote.
“Joe is going to have to explain to the people, to the union workers in the Midwest, why he supported disastrous trade deals like NAFTA, which have cost the country millions of good-paying jobs,” Sanders told reporters in Vermont on Wednesday.
“Does anybody think that Joe can go to Michigan or Wisconsin or Indiana or Minnesota and say, ‘Vote for me. I voted for those terrible trade deals’?” Sanders asked at a rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Monday.
Biden has defended this NAFTA vote, though he has often qualified his support. “I think that, back in the time during the Clinton administration, it made sense at the moment,” he said last year. He supports seeking out trade deals because “we need to write the rules of the road for international trade,” according to his campaign website. At a January debate, Biden warned that, if the United States didn’t take the lead, then China would fill the vacuum and “continue to abuse their power.”
The former vice president has modified his positions on trade in response to pressure from liberal groups but avoided taking an anti-trade stance. He was a lead proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration. He touted it at the time as an update of NAFTA, since the deal included Mexico and Canada among its 11 signatories. TPP was opposed by many liberal groups, however, who saw it as benefiting corporations at the expense of the environment. Trump opposed it, as well, and pulled the U.S. out. Last year, Biden backtracked and said, “I would not rejoin the TPP as it was initially put forward. I would insist that we renegotiate.”
There’s little evidence that attacking trade is an issue that most voters support. A February Gallup found that 82% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans see trade as a boost to the economy. However, skepticism of trade arrangements may play better in key states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democrat, strongly backed Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel imports during a tough but successful 2018 reelection bid in the steel-producing state. Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, another Democrat representing a steel-producing state, also applauded Trump’s tariffs prior to his reelection the same year.
NAFTA lowered trade barriers among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It is generally considered a success by economists. Data shows that all the economies of all three countries grew following its passage. By some metrics, the U.S.’s trade partners did do better, but their economies were smaller to start with, so they had much more room to grow.
Critics nevertheless contend that the trade deal was harmful because it spurred U.S. manufacturing to move supply chains out of the country. It is a rare point of agreement between Sanders and Trump. The president regularly savaged the deal during his 2016 presidential campaign and made replacing NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement a focus of his administration. The deal passed Congress in January, though Canada has yet to ratify it. The new trade deal attempts to shift supply chains back to the U.S. by requiring that 75% of an automobile’s parts be made in North America to be duty-free, up from 62.5%, and that at least 40% be built by people making at least $16 an hour.
Sanders opposed USMCA as well, arguing that it didn’t go far enough to address things such as climate change.
