Donald Trump’s denunciations of the trade agreement that President Obama’s team negotiated with Pacific Rim countries are being echoed in one of the most hotly-contested Senate races of the 2016 cycle, but on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Former Sen. Russ Feingold, who lost to Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson in 2010 and has come back for a rematch, said that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “very unfair” deal. “I’m calling on my opponent, the incumbent senator, to stand up for the middle-class and working families of Wisconsin by announcing his opposition to this terrible deal,” Feingold said in a Monday speech to in-state union members.
Feingold’s comments testify to the appeal of Trump’s protectionist economic policies among working-class voters, a key factor in Alabama’s Jeff Sessions becoming the first GOP senator to endorse Trump. But they come just as Trump is making himself particularly difficult for Johnson to embrace, because he refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke on Sunday.
Johnson is a proponent of free trade — “protectionism isn’t the answer,” he said in 2010 — but he said he still needs to review the trade deal. “This is an agreement of thousands of pages, and trust me, incredibly complex provisions,” he said earlier this month. “There is good, there is bad.”
Sessions, the most ardent GOP critic of TPP, cited Trump’s victory in the Nevada caucuses last week while arguing that the real estate mogul could win a general election by wooing working-class Democrats.
“It looks like working people who may have been voting Democrat voted for Trump in huge numbers,” Sessions said on Fox Business. “I’ve been talking about that for seven years. Our consultant ‘geniuses’ said you’ve got to be more moderate, you have to have more amnesty, and that’s the way to win elections. I think Trump is proving that’s not so.”
Trump refused to repudiate the support of white supremacists such as David Duke and the KKK on Sunday, though, which has Johnson “praying” for an alternative GOP nominee. “It’s just depressing, it’s depressing to see how this is devolving,” he said Monday on a local radio show.
