Essential Politics: Trade debate dominates the campaign in a ‘90s redux

Chalk up another first for the improbable 2016 presidential campaign: Not since the 1920s has the U.S. had an election in which neither major party candidate ran as a backer of free trade.

The benefit of an ever-greater expansion of global trade was the orthodoxy of both parties in the decades after World War II, and it remains a central ideological stand for many Republicans even now. But the party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, made clear this week that opposition to existing and proposed trade agreements will join immigration restriction as one of the main elements of his campaign.

Meantime, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has shied away from advocating further trade agreements. Under pressure from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton said last fall that she would oppose the Obama administration’s proposed Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and she has talked up her votes against some trade agreements negotiated by the George W. Bush administration while she was a senator.

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in the presidential campaign and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

THE BATTLE OVER TRADE

As Noah Bierman and Don Lee reported, Trump’s speech attacking trade put him at odds with some of the GOP’s biggest constituencies. He spent the balance of the week denouncing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as being dominated by “special interests” – roughly the equivalent of a Democratic candidate attacking the AFL-CIO.

Trump continued the assault all week. At a speech in New Hampshire on Thursday, Bierman reported, he argued that Americans should “pay a little bit more” to buy goods manufactured domestically.

Trump’s position, much like the “Brexit” vote in Britain, offers proof that the post-war era of ever-greater globalization of commerce has hit a pause, at minimum, as Lee wrote.

On one level, all this might seem extremely odd. The big changes in the U.S. caused by global trade and deindustrialization mostly happened decades ago. Pittsburgh, near where Trump spoke, long ago stopped being a symbol of Rust Belt decline. It’s now a prosperous, post-industrial city with an unemployment rate of 4.6% – below both the national and statewide averages.

The debate over NAFTA, which Trump rails against, was a major issue of the early 1990s, and by nearly all accounts the trade pact has not had a huge impact on the overall U.S. economy one way or the other. The proposed TPP is more about countering China’s rising influence in Asia than anything having to do with manufacturing.

But on this and other issues, the 2016 campaign seems set to relitigate parts of the Bill Clinton presidency. In this campaign, trade has become a stand-in for other issues related to globalization. It’s a way to connect to the sense of loss that many older, blue-collar voters feel about an era when manufacturing wages sufficed to provide a decent standard of living to men without college educations.

Denouncing unfair trade also provides a nonracial way to talk about the discomfort many voters feel with a country whose population is growing browner.

That undercurrent could be heard at Thursday’s event when a Trump supporter asked him about getting rid of the women wearing “heeby-jobbies” working as screeners for the Transportation Security Administration. President Obama hit at that Wednesday, as Christi Parsons reported, saying that Trump’s campaign had less to do with “populism” than with “nativism. Or xenophobia. Or worse.”

Whether Trump can ride a combination of racial anxiety, nostalgia and blue-collar anger to victory, even in the former Rust Belt states, remains uncertain. So far, polls show him losing all the major battleground states, and his denunciation of business groups as “special interests” could alienate a significant chunk of GOP voters and donors even as it attracts some former Democrats.

But this campaign almost certainly will accelerate the class shift in U.S. politics in which the GOP has increasingly become the home for white working class voters while the Democrats strengthen a coalition of minorities and college-educated whites.

DON’T FORGET THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

How does that shift affect the electoral map? See for yourself. You can play political strategist and try out as many scenarios as you like on our electoral map.

THE VEEPSTAKES

The week’s other running campaign story involved the running mates.

Clinton began the week campaigning in Ohio with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who, as Mike Memoli reported, electrified a partisan crowd with her attacks on Trump.

Just the day before, another person on the Clinton short list, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, was on a Sunday morning interview show joking that, yes, “I am boring,” but “boring is the fastest growing demographic in this country.”

Electrifying versus boring: Which way will Clinton go? If Clinton were trailing in the polls, Warren’s charisma and appeal to the party’s left might seem irresistible. But she’s not trailing.

As Memoli reported in his profile of the senator, Obama seriously considered Kaine eight years ago before settling on Joe Biden, in part because of Biden’s experience with foreign policy. Since then, Kaine has spent four years in the Senate focusing heavily on foreign affairs, adding to a resume that already includes popular governor of a key swing state and chair of the Democratic Party. And did I say he speaks fluent Spanish and is a former missionary?

The day before her campaign stop with Warren, Clinton made a speech to the nation’s mayors in which she talked up her qualities of steady leadership and pragmatic problem solving. Mayors understand the importance of that, she noted. Kaine is the former mayor of Richmond.

While Clinton was making that speech, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was refusing to say whether he thought Trump was qualified to be president.

Trump, of course, hates boring. As the Washington Post first reported, he’s seriously vetting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich along with several lesser-known GOP figures.

CONDOS, INDIAN TRIBES AND SUPER PACS

Inevitably, as a person becomes a presidential candidate, scrutiny of his or her record increases. This week, my colleagues reported on two illustrative incidents in Trump’s career:

Michael Finnegan looked at what happened when hundreds of people plunked down their savings to buy condos in a Trump-connected development in Baja California, and Joe Tanfani examined Trump’s covert battle against the Mohawk Indian tribe, which wanted to open a casino a couple of hours’ drive from New York City.

Meantime, Lisa Mascaro took a hard look at the motley crew of super PACs competing to cash in on the Trump phenomenon and, perhaps, help him out along the way. So far, they may be raising more discord than money.

All that, plus the polls which, on average, show Clinton about seven points ahead nationwide, continue to make many Republicans wish for a different nominee. But as Melanie Mason reported, the Dump Trump movement faces many hurdles, despite the efforts by some GOP convention delegates to push ahead with it.

EMAILS, BENGHAZI AND REINTRODUCTION

Clinton has her own headaches to deal with. Most prominent is the continued investigation into her email practices while secretary of State.

On Monday evening, Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch spent a half-hour chatting with Bill Clinton on her plane while both were at the airport in Phoenix. The attorney general insisted the meeting was merely a social call, a courtesy to the gregarious former president who wanted to say hello, but the incident brought bipartisan criticism.

By Friday, as Del Wilber reported, Lynch was making an official statement to confirm what would have been inevitable even if the meeting had never taken place – she won’t overrule whatever recommendation she gets from career prosecutors and FBI officials regarding the email case.

The email saga got its start as a side issue in the House Benghazi investigation. Republicans can count that as a significant win because it has shadowed Clinton’s campaign ever since the story became public more than a year ago.

The Benghazi probe came to an official end this week, as Evan Halper reported, with Republicans criticizing various Obama administration officials, but not finding any new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton. Democrats on the committee did, inadvertently, generate some news of their own, disclosing the hefty pay that Clinton crony Sid Blumenthal has collected from various political committees connected to her.

As Cathy Decker noted, Clinton keeps trying to look to the future and brush aside the past, but there’s a lot of past out there.

That’s a big reason why the Clinton campaign is spending much of its advertising budget right now on TV spots designed to improve her image with voters in swing states. As Memoli reported, it’s an approach directly out of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign playbook.

QUESTIONS ABOUT TRUMP, CLINTON? WE’VE GOT ANSWERS

Where they stand on issues, what they’ve done in their lives, their successes, their failures, what their presidencies might look like: We’ve been writing about Clinton and Trump for years, and we’ve pulled the best of that content together to make finding what you want to know easier. So check out All Things Trump and All Things Clinton.

WHAT WE’RE READING

If you want to know more about how the bases of the two parties have shifted, there’s no better source than Ron Brownstein, who takes another deep dive into the class inversion in his column in the Atlantic.

LOGISTICS

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That wraps up this week. My colleagues will be back Tuesday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in the 2016 campaign with our Trail Guide, at our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

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