The Washington Post recently published an op-ed about Sherrod Brown, a long-time Democratic Senator (and previously a Representative) from Ohio who lost his seat in the November election, highlighting his view that the passage of NAFTA led to "workers" leaving the Democratic party:
... Brown says the political shift in his state began with a signal event: the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
“Workers have slowly migrated out of the Democratic Party,” he told me. “It accelerated as more and more jobs were lost. And I still heard [about NAFTA] in this campaign, especially in the Miami Valley, Dayton, where we still won, [and] up there in Mahoning Valley, where we didn’t win.
I'm skeptical of this argument. In a post last March about a paper that asked "Why have white, less-educated voters left the Democratic Party?" and offered NAFTA as a reason, I argued that, based on the voting patterns of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, NAFTA is a not a good explanation for voters shifting to the Republicans because Republican members of Congress were much more in favor of NAFTA than Democrats were:
One problem with [NAFTA as an explanation for the shift] is that Republicans were more responsible for NAFTA than were Democrats. NAFTA was mainly negotiated by the Bush administration. Then when Clinton was elected, he got behind it and added labor and environmental provisions to the deal, with the aim of making it more acceptable to unions and progressive groups (and causing some free traders to abandon their support). While Clinton and Al Gore were the public face of NAFTA passage, it's clear that Republican politicians were more supportive than Democrats were. In the House, the Republicans voted 132-43 for NAFTA, whereas Democrats voted 156-102 against. And in the Senate, the Republicans voted 34-10 for NAFTA, whereas Democrats voted 28-27 against.
So why would the passage of NAFTA steer voters towards Republicans? The Republican presidential candidates after Clinton's time in office were trade liberalizing people such as George W. Bush and John McCain. Why would the previously Democratic voters annoyed with Clinton's NAFTA support shift to a Republican party led by these free traders? Why wouldn't the passage of NAFTA steer voters towards protectionist Democrats, of which there were and are plenty? ...
This discussion was not state-specific, but now we have Brown invoking NAFTA as the explanation for the Ohio electorate's shift away from Democrats. I assume he knows Ohio pretty well, but is he right about this? Let's look at some of the votes there to test this out a bit.
Starting with the Congressional votes on the passage of NAFTA, both Ohio Senators at the time, John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum, were Democrats, and they both voted against NAFTA. And over in the House, there were 19 Representatives back then, with 10 Democrats and 9 Republicans. The Democrats (including then-Representative Sherrod Brown) voted 8-2 against NAFTA and the Republicans voted 7-2 in favor.
What see pretty clearly in Ohio, then, is that at the national level, Republican politicians were very pro-NAFTA and Democratic politicians were very anti-NAFTA at the time of its passage.
Now let's look at how Ohioans voted in the elections that came after NAFTA. Which party did they support? And what were the NAFTA views of the candidates they voted for?
Starting with presidential elections, in the 1996 presidential vote in Ohio, the two main candidates were Bill Clinton and pro-NAFTA Republican Bob Dole, with Clinton getting a plurality of the vote. Then in both 2000 and 2004, George Bush, a relatively free trade-oriented Republican, won. The 2000 election is a little hard to read because NAFTA proponent Al Gore was the Democratic nominee, so I'm not sure which candidate voters thought was more closely associated with NAFTA/free trade. By 2004, Bush had negotiated several NAFTA-like FTAs, so it was pretty clear where he stood. His opponent John Kerry was also a NAFTA supporter, although he was talking tough on trade during the campaign.
Based on these presidential elections, it does seem like there was a shift towards Republicans in Ohio by the year 2000, but I don't think it's very convincing to argue that the Ohioans voting for George Bush that year were doing so on the basis of anti-NAFTA feelings.
Turning to the Senate, Metzenbaum's term was up in 1994 and he did not run again. The Senate election that year was between Republican Mike DeWine and Democrat Joel Hyatt. Here are the two NAFTA references I found in their debate:
DeWine: I think that we are clearly a nation of immigrants, and so we should, as Joel has pointed out very well, encourage legal immigration into this country, and we must discourage illegal immigration. One of the best ways to discourage illegal immigration, though, is to boost our trade with Mexico. One of the reasons, frankly, that I supported NAFTA, not only is it in the best interest of the state of Ohio, but I think it will help Mexico. It will help the middle class rise up there, which will make it much less likely that people will be entering this country illegally.
...
Question: Mr. Dewine, you both favor the GATT accord. You both favor line item veto. You both favor balanced budget amendments. Please tell us a specific, significant difference between you and your opponent that would help create jobs?
DeWine: Well, Tim, he has changed his position on GATT, and he has changed his position on NAFTA. He supported NAFTA ... was opposed to NAFTA when it was important to get the labor unions' endorsements before the primary. Then he's apparently changed his position. So with all due respect, I'm not sure that the premise of the question is entirely correct.
DeWine explicitly emphasized his support for NAFTA and questioned Hyatt's support for it. Pro-NAFTA DeWine won that election, so while Ohioans did move towards the Republicans, it's hard to see how anti-NAFTA sentiment was behind that. DeWine won again in 2000.
Glenn's term was up in 1998 and he also did not run again. That election was between Republican George Voinovich and Democrat Mary Boyle. Here is the one NAFTA reference I saw in their debate:
Question:
An issue that's important to the people of the Miami Valley is the loss of jobs to other countries, such as through NAFTA. As US senator from Ohio, how will you protect Ohio jobs?
Voinovich:
Well, first of all, one of the things that I'm very proud of is that when I became governor of the state of Ohio, we had the second highest unemployment of the 10 largest states. Today, our unemployment is at the lowest that it's been in 25 years, we've created more than 504,000 jobs. And as I mentioned before, our welfare roles are the lowest ... that is very much a part of the growth of jobs. As a matter of fact, in 1992 our export was 16 and a half billion dollars. Today it's 27 and a half billion dollars. The Commerce Department conservatively says that for every billion dollars of export, we create about 14,200 jobs. So we've created 100 and some 47,000 jobs because of export. And I want to point out that since NAFTA and the free trade agreement in the state of Ohio, we have increased our export to Canada by 91%. We do 12 and a half billion dollars with Canada a day. And with Mexico, Mexico is our seventh largest trading partner. Today, Mexico is our fourth largest trading partner. And last year, we increased our export to Mexico 40%, over a billion dollars. So that between the NAFTA countries, Canada and Mexico, they represent over half of the export of the state of Ohio. So I think there's a lot of misinformation out there talking about NAFTA and what its impact is, and in terms of losing jobs. I know some businesses in Ohio that had facilities in Mexico that after NAFTA closed them, because the only way they could do business in Mexico was to move to Mexico; when they took the trade barriers down, they were able to manufacture the products in Ohio and ship them to Mexico.
Boyle:
Well, it's a good question, because I believe the most important thing we can do in terms of economic development in Ohio is build on our strengths right here, and the Miami Valley has many of those strengths. I believe most importantly, we ought to be talking about how we really move forward in a global environment, building on our strengths. That means we ought to be exporting our products, our manufactured products, and our agricultural products, but we also ought to be building and protecting our jobs here. There may be new jobs created in Ohio, but I would only put those percentages in light of what's happened all over the country. There have been over 15 and a half million jobs created in this country since the economy began to turn around in 1993. So I don't even know if Ohio has gotten its fair share of that development. What I am concerned about is making sure that we take the best advantage we can of what we have here. We have Wright Patterson here as a real key component of building the economy for the future here, moving into high technology and other areas, that we really can make a difference in terms of manufacturing those kinds of goods for the future. That's a lot more important than exporting our jobs. I believe that we have the core here in this part of the state of Ohio of really building the economy of this whole state. But it's going to take the kind of leadership at the state level and also at the national level to start with building on our strengths. Our workers are a well trained workforce. You can't talk about moving jobs to Mexico without remembering that in Celina, Ohio, the Huffy bicycle plant employed 960 people. Huffy went to Mexico and the 960 jobs are gone.
Voinovich, who comes across in his answers as much more supportive of NAFTA than Boyle, won this election, so again we see a pro-NAFTA Republican winning.
Summing up on the Ohio Senate, the passage of NAFTA was followed by a shift from anti-NAFTA Democrats to pro-NAFTA Republicans. I'm not saying NAFTA played much of a role in any of this, as Americans don't rank trade very highly in their hierarchy of important policies. And perhaps there is more to this than I was able to dig up in a few quick searches, and I'm happy to be corrected if I missed something in these elections (or later ones). Nevertheless, on the face of things, it does not seem as though anti-NAFTA sentiment is what drove people from the Democrats to the Republicans in the first couple post-NAFTA Ohio Senate races.
In the House, by 2000 the breakdown was 11-8 for the Republicans; by 2004 it was 12-6 (Ohio had its number of seats reduced that year). It would be interesting to see what the candidates were saying about NAFTA in Ohio Congressional races in the post-NAFTA period, and I encourage others to go further with this type of analysis (in both Ohio and other states).
On the general argument that Brown makes about NAFTA causing "workers" to move away from Democrats, the presidential and congressional elections cited above clearly show that there was a shift to the Republicans in this period, but what is the explanation? Republicans were the more pro-NAFTA party at the time of Congressional passage, and Ohio voters supported free trade-oriented, pro-NAFTA Republicans for president and senator in the subsequent elections. This undermines the argument that anti-NAFTA sentiment is the key to understanding the shift.
What might be an alternative explanation for the shift? Brown seems to want to downplay social issues here, arguing that even if Democrats are out of step with voters on these issues, economic issues can bring them back:
... Brown insists that Democrats can — and must — win back the votes of working-class Americans. Those voters may disagree with some of the party’s stances on social issues, such as guns, abortion, crime and immigration, but will return to the fold “if we stay on economic issues and do it right.”
My sense of things is very different. As I see it, social issues are where the Democrats are struggling with the specific group of voters being targeted here, with crime and immigration as two of the key problem areas at the moment. On these two and a couple other issues, my impression is that the Democrats' policies and/or messaging (1) have moved to the left since 1993 and (2) are a bit vague and unpersuasive to the voters in question. In my view, that is one of the main reasons these particular voters have left the Democrats. But there's not much science to any of this, and from what I can see on the internet, the debate over which direction the Democrats should go now on both economic and social policy is wide open.
ADDED:
To assist anyone who wants to look more deeply at the politics of NAFTA in Ohio, I wanted to mention that in the House of Representatives, it looks like there were four seats that shifted from Democrats to Republicans in the 1994 election (the Democrat's vote on NAFTA is in parentheses):
- 1st: David Mann (D) (Yes) to Steve Chabot (R)
- 6th: Ted Strickland (D) (No) to Frank Cremeans (R) (and back to Strickland in the 1996 election)
- 18th: Doug Applegate (D) (No) to Bob Ney (R). (Applegate retired, and Ney beat Greg DiDonato in the 1994 election).
- 19th: Eric Fingerhut (D) (No) to Steve LaTourette (R)
It's harder to find information on House races than Senate races, so the basic internet searches I did were not able to turn up much on the role of NAFTA in these elections. I'll leave the serious research for others who want to dig into this, but I did find some interesting details on the Mann vs. Chabot race.
The Washington Post wrote about Mann vs. Chabot just before the election, noting that labor unions were annoyed with Mann for his vote in favor of NAFTA. While some labor leaders helped organize a primary challenge against Mann (Mann won the closely contested primary), most ultimately supported him in the general election:
Shortly before the House voted on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) last year, Frank W. Butler lunched with his old friend, Rep. David Mann (D-Ohio). Mann confided to Butler that he was leaning toward voting for the pact, which was bitterly opposed by organized labor.
...Nationally, the AFL-CIO has endorsed 59 House Democrats and five Democratic senators who voted to approve the trade agreement that eliminated trade barriers among the United States, Mexico and Canada, part of a dismal record for labor in the 103rd Congress that also failed to enact legislation overhauling the health care system and banning the hiring of permanent replacement workers for striking union members.
"The vote on NAFTA has been taken," said AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland in explaining the endorsements that are made at the local level. "It is done. It is not an issue in the next Congress as far as I am aware."In a get-out-the-vote videotape sent to union locals, Rich Walsh, director of the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education, dismissed NAFTA as "the big exception" to a strong pro-labor record by Congress and the Clinton administration. What's important now, Walsh and other AFL-CIO officials argue in the tape, is to prevent big election gains by labor's Republican enemies.
As for Chabot, I couldn't find anything on what he was saying about NAFTA at the time of the 1994 election, but an interview he gave a few years ago in the context of Trump's protectionism makes clear that he was pro-NAFTA:
I'm a free trader, okay? Always have been. I think I was for NAFTA. I was a bit concerned about [Trump] taking on trade as an issue because I didn't necessarily look at it the way he does. I'll give him credit for it's working, that he hasn't done away with NAFTA or repealed it. He's improved it. It was a bit scary when we're working with our Canadian allies, and I think they are our biggest trading partner, if I'm not mistaken, but they're way up there. He's falling out with Justin Trudeau, and it's scary, but the agreement they've come with is an improvement over NAFTA. Mexican's government on board, the Canadian government's on board, and we're now going to be able to ... I mean, just giving you automobiles for example. Right now, I think it's 62 1/2%, or something like that, of the content of a car, according to NAFTA, has to be American made. Now it's up to 75%. That's going to mean real jobs here in the United States. Some coming back, some not going away in the first place. That's a big deal for a whole lot of people that are going to have good paying, a lot of union jobs here in America. Our dairy farmers have had a heck of a time getting their dairy products into Canada because of their rules over there. That has been modified dramatically, and we're going to have a whole lot of farmers that are going to be able to now export their milk and ice cream and everything into Canada. Our intellectual property protections are going to be much better as result. These are just improvements. I was for TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, and T-TIP, which was with the Europeans. I voted for our trade agreement with South Korea, for example.
