The Daily - How NAFTA Broke American Politics

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are constantly talking about trade, tariffs and domestic manufacturing.In many ways, these talking points stem from a single trade deal that transformed the U.S. economy and remade both parties’ relationship with the working class.Dan Kaufman, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, explains how the North American Free Trade Agreement broke American politics.Guest: Dan Kaufman, the author of “The Fall of Wisconsin,” and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: How NAFTA broke American politics.Both Democrats and Republicans are expressing support for tariffs to protect American industry, reversing decades of trade thinking in Washington.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Balbaro. This is The Daily. A very, very big hello to Wisconsin. Oh, it's good to be back in Michigan. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are constantly talking about trade, tariffs, and domestic manufacturing. Now people are moving their companies to other countries and we're getting killed by the way by Mexico. We announced the opening of more than 20 new auto plants in the United States.

We'll put a tariff of 200% on if we have to. We're not letting those cars come into the United States. And we will ensure that the next generation of breakthroughs are not only invented but built right here in America by American union workers. That's because in many ways, the United States is still reeling from a single trade deal that transformed the U.S. economy and remade both parties' relationship to the working class. Today, Times Magazine writer Dan Kaufman

with the story of how the North American Free Trade Agreement broke American politics. It's Tuesday, October 8th. Dan, it's a pretty rare thing when we can trace the origins of our politics back to something really concrete and specific, not a set of vast and tangible forces, but a moment in time when a group of people got together and made a decision. And you contend that to understand our politics today, specifically to understand this presidential campaign, you can go back to one such decision made in the 1990s around U.S. trade policy. So just explain that and justify it.

Sure. Well, in 1993, Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. It was signed into law by Bill Clinton. What it did was it opened up trade with Mexico and Canada. And I think it was one of the most pivotal political moments. It signaled the outsourcing of good-paying manufacturing jobs, particularly in the Rust Belt states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio.

But it also signaled something much more long-term and transformative. And I think that is a political shift with the Democratic Party moving away from its working class, New Deal roots, towards the professional class. And towards the college-educated. College-educated and wealthier, including a lot of people on Wall Street. And the Republican Party, which had traditionally been the party of big business, at least rhetorically embracing a working class politics, whether or not they fulfilled any of those promises, is another question, but the rhetoric changed markedly.

In other words, NAFTA is a moment where our basic understandings and assumptions about how the two parties relate to this really huge and always symbolically significant segment of the population, the working class, the people who work in factories, the people who make things. It changes and it kind of shatters. That's right. It realigned the parties. And I think those dynamics are still playing out today. So, Dan, take us back to the time and the place

and the debate that brought us NAFTA. And I should say I vaguely remember it because I think it was pretty much the first big public policy debate that occurred in my young adulthood. CNN was kind of a mainstay in my childhood living room. And I can remember some of this, but very vaguely. So plunge us back into it. So, the debate over NAFTA emerged at a kind of interesting, difficult moment in the 1970s. There was a period of high inflation and then high interest rates, and this eventually led

to two recessions. That is the context in which Ronald Reagan first floats in 1979, this idea of a North American free trade agreement. And what was the logic of it? He was really influenced by Milton Friedman, a libertarian economist. They believe that free trade was a win-win situation, that it would increase our exports, which would create all these jobs and take away government regulation. And they were deeply opposed to that.

And Reagan actually managed to take a step towards NAFTA. He had made an agreement with Canada that allowed for goods to be exported without tariffs or duties and goods to be imported without tariffs or duties. Thus free trade. Thus it was called free trade. But the US and Canada had similarly developed economies. They paid about the same level in wages. The difference with NAFTA was now you were creating a similar agreement with

Mexico, with a country that was quite impoverished. And the critics immediately feared that it was merely a pretext to allow corporations to exploit cheap labor. In other words, they could avoid paying union wages by moving plants to Mexico. Mexican workers were paid far less than a unionized Canadian or American worker. So in this moment, there's really a philosophical debate occurring. Will this trade agreement help the US economy or will it hurt it? And the Republicans, from what you're saying, are coming down strongly on the side of this being good for the US economy and good for the United States in general.

Yeah, that's right. And it was really George H.W. Bush who pursued NAFTA and actually negotiated the agreement with his counterparts, the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico. However, it still needed to be ratified by Congress and then signed into law by the President. So NAFTA becomes the centerpiece of the 1992 presidential campaign. Good evening and welcome to the second

of three presidential debates between the major candidates for President of the United States. There were three candidates, George H.W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, versus Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, and then a really interesting third party candidate named Ross Perot, who was a wealthy businessman. So, President Bush, I think you said it earlier, let's get it on. Let's go. George H.W. Bush took the position that the

agreement should just be signed. The thing that saved us in this global economic slowdown has been our exports. And what I'm trying to do is increase our exports. It would lead to an export boom and a great flourishing of American jobs. And I want to have more of these free trade agreements. Ross Perot was the most critical. The most important issue for him was opposition to NAFTA. And he articulated that position. If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south the border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement.

And you don't care about anything but making money. He issued one of the most memorable lines about NAFTA. There will be a giant sucking sound going south. He said that there would be a giant sucking sound of American jobs if NAFTA was passed. I'd like to answer the question because I've actually been a governor for 12 years. Bill Clinton did something very striking. He took a middle position. So I've known a lot of people who've lost their jobs because of jobs moving overseas.

And I know a lot of people whose plants have been strengthened by increasing exports. In which he supported the agreement. The trick is to expand our export base and to expand trade on terms that are fair to us. But he wanted separate side agreements to protect environmental regulations and labor. So more trade but on fair terms and favor investment in America. Thank you. I think we have a question over here. I think we have a question over here. So Bush, the Republican in the race, he's pretty much saying, do this deal. Don't worry about it.

It's going to work out. Perot, the independent, is saying, don't do this deal. This is a terrible idea. It's going to hurt American manufacturing. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and as we know, future president, he's trying to straddle those two. And I want to linger on Clinton. Why do you think Clinton took that middle approach, given that the Democratic Party

had been the party of organized labor and had relied on manufacturing workers and their unions as such a core constituency in elections? Right. Well, the Democrats had been out of power for 12 years by that point. There was a tremendous desire to reclaim the presidency. Bill Clinton was also part of what they called the New Democrats, which had emerged in the 80s, and it was trying to reorient the party to be more business-friendly,

corporate-friendly, and remove its image as a party that was supportive of the activist government of the New Deal, that it had become modernized. And NAFTA was seen as the future. Organized labor was deeply opposed throughout. And the reason he tried to find this middle position was to allay their fears and to thread this needle. And for the purposes of this election, he did thread the needle. He won. However, it's also worth noting that Ross Perot won 19% of the vote.

That was the highest share since 1912. For a third party candidate. Right. And Bill Clinton is now the president of the United States, the first Democrat in 12 years, and he begins selling NAFTA. I have lived with the manufacturing changes of the last 15 years. And I would never knowingly do anything that would cost Americans jobs. Mainly to the Democratic Party. He needed a significant faction of them in order to pass it.

So he pushed very, very hard. But I'm telling you, nothing I do as your president within the borders of the United States can create more jobs and higher incomes unless somebody buys the stuff we produce. He thought more exports would help create more American jobs, offsetting whatever loss of jobs we would have. I mean, this is a, the world is changing. So as cruel or tough as it is, we can't pretend that it's not gonna happen. There was also an undercurrent of inevitability.

Globalization was here, whether we like it or not, and we had to tame it to our benefit. So I ask you to talk to your friends and neighbors. Talk to the people who are worried about it. Tell them their fears are well-founded, but they don't have anything to do with this agreement. This agreement will make it better. The other thing he does is he dispatches Al Gore, his vice president. Welcome to a special edition of Larry King Live.

And Gore winds up sitting across from Ross Perot on Larry King Live. This is a huge... This I remember. This was an event. Huge national event. And they debate NAFTA. When I'm in a room with corporate America, the first thing they say is, Perot, why don't you keep your mouth shut?

Perot is saying his corporate CEO friends are telling him, please shut up. This is a great deal for us. Meanwhile, Gore is relying heavily on this technocratic expertise. Every living former president of the United States in both parties, every former secretary of state, every former secretary of treasury, every living Nobel Prize winner in economics, conservatives, liberals, everyone in between. They've never agreed on anything in our way. He is basically saying this is an empirical fact.

There have been 23 studies of the impact of NAFTA on jobs in the United States. 22 of them have shown that it will cause an increase in jobs in the United States. It's what the experts say is the best thing. He's saying trust the smartest people in the country. Trust the United States. It's what the experts say is the best thing. He's saying trust the smartest people in the country. Trust the smartest people. And that is also really interesting in terms of the Democratic Party's realignment away from working class, labor-oriented party towards someone that is really concerned with technocratic advice.

And there's another professional class constituency that's deeply in favor. That is the media, including the New York Times. Our editorial board, we should probably say. Our editorial board. A lot of the media were now college-educated folks, and they were distant from these working-class places. Organized labor, the people that were fighting NAFTA, were seen as yesterday's news. They were fighting a losing battle. NAFTA was the future. It was irreversible. There was a lot of triumphalism

around this time. It feels like what you're describing is something of an echo chamber where these democratic leaders in the Clinton administration are talking about how every expert thinks this is the right thing to do. These journalists are hearing that and saying, well, it must be the right thing to do. And the are hearing that and saying, well, it must be the right thing to do. And the overall message that you're there for hearing from the news media and the White House is kind of the same, which is this is the right thing to do.

Yes, it was an echo chamber. But you know, it was still a very unpopular idea among the American public. Polling at one point showed that two thirds of the American public were against it. Wow. At the same time there remained one hugely consequential hurdle to the enactment of NAFTA and that was the vote in the House of Representatives. A bill to implement the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And I would say it was one of the most important debates as far as contemporary politics. The Speaker for months, the people of America and its representatives have struggled with the challenge of NAFTA. Is it good or is it bad? Will it help to expand our economy or shrink it? Today, the House must decide. And the critics were really heard loudly in the House debate.

Corporate America and the big money interests have told us that NAFTA is a good deal. I don't believe them. People like Bernie Sanders, who was an independent at the time, spoke out passionately against it. Even the administration admits there will be at least 200,000 people who will lose their jobs. And what are we giving to them? Table scraps. And a lot of Democrats came out and forced against it.

Mr. Speaker, this debate comes down to one simple question. Whose side are you on? One of the leading opponents of NAFTA was David Bonior, who was from Michigan and was the House whip. The working people who stand against this treaty don't have degrees from Harvard. They don't study economic models. But they know when the deck is stacked against them. They know it's not fair to ask American workers to compete against Mexican workers who earn a dollar an hour. He emphasized the resentment of a lot of working class people

towards the elite experts that were telling them that they couldn't understand the possible benefits to them. But there were a lot of Democratic representatives that were more favorable to NAFTA. Understandably, many members of this body and citizens of this country are concerned about job loss. I am too.

I am supporting this agreement because job creation and exports go hand in hand. Madam Chairman, I rise in support today and in all honesty, a decision of this kind has been a tough call for someone from my region of the country. The fact is that change is not something to fear. We are sending a message about whether the world's only superpower thinks its best days are in the past or in the future. NAFTA is neither heaven nor hell. It's neither Nirvana nor the depths of depression.

It just makes good sense for America's economic future. I urge my colleagues to vote for it. And then there was the vote. On this vote the yeas are 234, the nays are 200, and the bill is passed. And it passes narrowly, 234 to 200. This is a decisive moment for the Democratic Party. The vast majority of Republicans voted for NAFTA, but it was crucial that Democrats had supported it, more than 100 of them. Bill Clinton's trade representative later said George Bush could have never passed NAFTA,

that it had to have been a Democrat. It had to have been Bill Clinton. He said no Republican president could have because he couldn't have brought enough Democrats. The Senate soon passed the bill three days later, and in early December 1993, Bill Clinton signs NAFTA into law. So Dan, once NAFTA goes from theoretical and the debate is over into a day-to-day free trade reality across North America. What ends up happening? Well GDP is increasing the economy is booming on a lot of levels for a lot of people but it also launches the free

trade juggernaut. Several years later Bill Clinton is able to establish permanent normal trade relations with China. Meanwhile, in the United States, a lot of factories are moving overseas. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 American plants closed. Some five million manufacturing jobs were lost. This translated into loss of union jobs and a tremendous rise in income inequality. Most of the benefits for NAFTA were going to wealthier people. So while it was a net gain for the country as a whole, it wasn't within the country. In other words, the people that don't have a college degree are hurt by trade deals with low-wage countries.

And, you know, it's important to remember that more than 60% of the population does not have a college degree. There was a British behavioral scientist that did a study of wellness, and he found that the psychological toll of losing a job is equivalent to losing your spouse. Wow. So it's no wonder that people feel that their lives have been totally destroyed. And this pain is concentrated very heavily in a lot of the Rust Belt states, Michigan, Ohio, and my own home state of Wisconsin, where we start to see the human and political impacts from NAFTA. We'll be right back. So Dan, tell us what you have found through all your reporting in Wisconsin about the

impacts of NAFTA on workers, jobs, and over time on the politics of that place. Sure. Wisconsin is one of the places where NAFTA's dark side has really become clear. Milwaukee, which is the state's biggest city and the industrial center of the state, it was once known as the machine shop of the world, produced truck frames, agricultural machinery, motors, industrial controls. But, you know, it's important to understand that deindustrialization was already happening before NAFTA passed. Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee had already lost a quarter of its manufacturing jobs. And then you have NAFTA, which really accelerated this process. And one of the companies that I paid particular attention to is Master Lock. Everybody

knows their iconic padlocks. These are the locks literally you use on your high school locker. Right. Those combination locks. They've been making locks in Milwaukee since the 1920s. The plant was a smaller industrial factory at its peak. It employed about 1,300 people. But everyone I spoke to loved working there.

It was something that was deeply embedded in the city's sort of industrial consciousness. And after NAFTA passes, they did what a lot of other companies were doing. They built a plant in Mexico. In their case, this plant in Nogales was quickly taking jobs from the Milwaukee plant. Within a two or three year period, a thousand union positions were sent abroad. But the plant kept going and it kept employing people, although on much smaller scale than it used to. And one of the people that I spent time with recently

is a very interesting worker named Chansey Adams. Chansey, man. What's up? How you doing? Doing good. And he helped me really understand the impact of NAFTA on him and on the wider community and really on American politics as a whole.

Just start at the beginning. What was it like growing up in Milwaukee when you were, this was like in the 80s and 90s? It was hard, but it wasn't, if that makes sense what I'm trying to say. Tell us about Chansey Adams, what should we know? Well, Chansey was born in 1980, grew up on the North side of Milwaukee.

I come up in a single family home, so me and my brother, my sister, my mother. He was raised by a single mom. She was a cook at a Milwaukee museum. I mean, she was a hard worker. She went to work and make sure we had everything we needed and we came up and never went hungry, never went without clothes or anything.

What about the neighborhood you grew up in? Just describe what it was like when you were a kid. It was great to me. I grew up on 9 umbrella, so it was a lot of bad things going on down there. It was a lot of drug dealing and stuff like that, but I don't have nothing bad to say about where I grew up in my childhood. It was good. When you were young, what did you do for fun in the neighborhood?

He described a happy childhood biking around with his friends. I rode past Mass like a thousand thousand times as a kid, you know. One of the places where they biked around were the plants on the north side of Milwaukee. This was a city that's deeply entwined with its industrial history, and Milwaukee is filled with these factories. Miller, Mastrolot, Britten-Stratten, A.O. Smith, them was the places where a lot of people

from the south came. Like my family was Britten-Statton and A.O. Smith. Them the plants they got in. And these are places where Chancey's relatives worked. Growing up, you hear older people talk, like them are the places where you wanna be. And it was like solid, good wage. Good wage, and you can tell when we was like kids,

we'd be right there and you'd see the cars out there. You see all nice cars going to work. We knew that was money. So if you was like my age then and you figure, hey, I'm not going to college, but I'm going to, these are one of the jobs that you was going to try to get. Eventually, a friend of his who had gotten a job at Master Lock calls him and says, you know, you should really apply here. Let me try it out.

And he actually got me in. So he applies for a job at Master Lock as a temp and gets one in 2010. Now, Dan, you had said there isn't a ton of Master Lock left after NAFTA. So by the time Chansey gets a job there in 2010, how much of Master Locke is there for him to really join in Milwaukee? There's only a couple hundred union positions at that point.

Chansey started out at a little more than $10 an hour, but Chansey talked so much about how immediately he took to it. You know, I see a lot of these older men and the things they accumulated in life working at this plant and the work they put in, and I'm like, you know, that's what I want right there. For Chansey and a lot of the workers, while the starting wage was low, there was a lot of room for advancement to skilled jobs that paid much, much more.

How much does Chansey and everyone else among these several hundred workers who are still at Master Lock, how much do they worry that what's left of this company would eventually be outsourced under the incentives of NAFTA? I think some feared it, but many felt like they were secure. They had highly specialized jobs. And there was another reason they felt this sense of security. Do you remember when President Obama came to the plant? Yeah, that was my first year there.

First, or second year. Hello, Milwaukee! In 2012, Barack Obama paid a visit to Master Lock. I'm actually here today because this company has been making the most of a huge opportunity that exists right now to bring jobs and manufacturing back to the United States of America. I knew it wasn't going nowhere. He was there on the strip of how Master Lock Post had been bringing jobs back. By then, Master Lock had increased its Milwaukee workforce to a little more than 300. Some people told me it was because they'd had a few challenges manufacturing overseas. So there was a modest reshoring,

but something that was trumpeted by the President of the United States. We're gonna create more success stories like Master Lock, and we will remind the world just why it is the United States is the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you everybody, God bless you. God bless you, man. God bless you, man.

God bless you, man. God bless you, man. God bless you, man. I just happened to be so close, so when he came off the stage, he was just shaking everybody's hand. And I was right there. So I shook his hand and everything.

How did it make you feel? I'm the man. I mean, you got to think about where I come from, where I come from. I just shook the president's hand. Because I didn't really know too much about politics and stuff like that. And I was in the union now and, you know, I was learning a little bit at a time. And for Chansey, this is a big moment. He had never been politically active, but he had started getting involved with the union.

And here he is, meeting the President of the United States, who the union is heavily supporting. So I voted. And he votes for the first time in his life for Barack Obama. He the man. They called me Obama at the plant because I was the first black guy to run the HydroMat at Mashalot.

And he starts moving up at the plant. He learns to operate a complex machine called a HydroMat at Mash-A-Lot. And he starts moving up at the plant. He learns to operate a complex machine called a HydroMat. And now he's making $20 an hour. He's working a lot, sometimes seven days a week, making a lot of overtime, and he buys his first house. When I met the guy over here I bought the house from, he used to work at Mash-A-Lot. And I got my keys and all of that,

and I sat on my stairs over here and I cried. Because like, I'm sitting on these stairs right now. I'm sitting on my sweat right now. I worked hard and I bought my first house. And I bought it at 35 or something. By myself. Eventually he's earning more than $30 an hour. And not only is his job at Master Lock helping him grow a nest egg and support his family,

he's got four kids, but it's a real source of pride for him. My mother was very, my sister and brother, they're very proud of it. My brother work now. He said one of the things that gets him up in the morning knowing that I'm up in the morning. I know little bro up. I know he going to work. Oh, let me get up. You know what I'm saying? It's a beautiful feeling to be the little brother and have everybody look up to your work ethic and see when you come from and seeing what you're accumulating. I did become a man in that plant.

It made me realize I'm a good man. I feel good about myself. I feel good going to work every day and coming in and the younger guys looking at me, how I looked at the older guys when I was coming in young. They see me in my uniform. they see me, you know, with a nice haircut, smelling good. They know that it's strictly sweat that's got me what I got. So it makes you feel great, you know. I wasn't going anywhere. Tell me about May 24th last year. At the beginning of the day was a normal day.

The supervisor, he came to us and said, we have the town hall. So we go upstairs, but the whole scenery was different. Like the chairs was turquoise a certain way. It was tables like barricaded and it was armed guards up there. So I'm like, whoa, what's going on? And he announced it. I have some bad news. I'm here to inform y'all of March of 24, the plant will be closing.

And the whole room was silent. No explanation, no nothing. A couple people got up and walked out. Some ladies started crying. Some men were just angry. Some guys said, I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

What were you feeling when you heard the news? I went numb. And then I got a sense of being scared. I put my whole life around this place. I don't know nothing else. You know, like, what am I going to do? Like, I got responsibilities here. You know, like what am I going to do? Like I got responsibilities here.

What am I supposed to do now? I'm 43 years old. Starting all the way over. So 30 years after NAFTA passed, the Master Lock plant in Milwaukee is finally closing. That's right. It's the final chapter on the Milwaukee story of Master Lock. Some of these jobs will go to other places, but one union official told me that most of them will go to the company's plant in Nogales, Mexico.

So what happens to Chansey? Well, Chansey is really in a kindales, Mexico. So what happens to Chancey? Well, Chancey is really in a kind of desperate state. He's scrambling. No one wanted to hire me. He applies for jobs. Nothing is coming through. But then a coworker at Master Lock gets him a job at another factory, but he's making a lot less than what he used to at Master Lock.

So I had to get another job. I was going to lose my house. So he eventually picks up a second job. Get there by 5 a.m. Now his days start very early. Whenever I get done. So usually about nine o'clock, nine thirty. And very late.

And then have to come right home and try to eat something, jump in the bed and get up again at 345. He hardly has any time for himself, except a little bit on the weekends. So it's a constant moving, constant grind, constant no sitting down. And it's tiring, you know, mentally really. I keep thinking back to the Democrats on the House floor who warned that this is what was going to happen. And for a time in listening to you tell this story about Chansey, it feels that he's the

exception. You know, he's not going to be hurt by NAFTA. But it feels like one of the morals of this story is that NAFTA kind of comes for almost everyone when it comes to these plants in the upper Midwest. Yeah, I think that's true. And there's so many ways that NAFTA has shifted the power balance. You know, we talked a lot about the closing of these plants, but it's also true that NAFTA gave companies enormous leverage even just to threaten to close the plant. And that they could extract steep concessions on unions and others to lower their wages.

It's a real downward pressure on working class Americans. We talked about this a bit. I just want to make sure. So you're not planning to vote this year? Nah, I'm done with that. It's pointless. I haven't benefited off of nothing that any president had ever done. It's always been taken from me.

If you're poor or right in the middle of poor middle class, you're going to bust your ass, man, to get what you want. There's no help. That's why I have no respect for politics, presidents, and it changed me. Do you have any thoughts on Trump or Kamala Harris? Trump is a crook, but he gangster. I love that guy.

He don't care. The only good thing I can say about Trump is he's a businessman. He'll be successful that way, I think. Kamala Harris, she's just a crook. Everybody keep getting on this black wave, black wave. Because they're black, you should vote for my own. I don't care what color you are, you suck, you suck. I definitely have no faith in her.

If I was to vote and I had to choose between the two, I would vote for Trump. At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about this idea that NAFTA and its aftermath turned the Democrats from the party of the working class into the party of college educated elites, which helps me understand in a way I don't think I ever really did before just how much of an opening Republicans had to remake themselves into the party that exploits that. And that obviously comes in the candidacy of Donald Trump. Exactly. Exactly. Free trade in the candidacy of Donald Trump. Exactly.

Exactly. Free trade is the mantra of both parties. It's what's coming out of Washington until the 2016 election. I'm going to say something that conservatives don't like because while I'm a free trader, I'm a smart trader. I'm a fair trader. I know what I'm a smart trader. I'm a fair trader. I know what I'm doing. Donald Trump emphasized an economic nationalist message. And you're losing plants over here. And you're losing a plant over there.

Highlighting the job losses from NAFTA and other free trade deals. Any direction I can point to, you're losing jobs, you're losing your plans. We're not going to let it happen anymore. You're losing your plans. We're not gonna let it happen anymore So now you have an incredible shift in the Republican Party The party that created NAFTA in the first place is now opposed to it at least rhetorically Mm-hmm. And of course the Democratic candidate he faces is none other than Hillary Clinton Your husband signed NAFTA, which was one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry.

Well, that's your opinion. That is your opinion. And in the presidential debates, NAFTA becomes one of the most important issues. NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now... Trump rails against it, calls it the worst deal ever made. I think my husband did a pretty good job in the 1990s.

I think a lot about what worked and how we can make it work again. Well, he approved NAFTA. But Clinton largely defended it. Which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country. Incomes went up for everybody. What was it, do you think, in this debate and in this campaign that made Hillary Clinton and the Democrats so confident that NAFTA, opposition to it, was a losing strategy for Trump.

Because clearly she could have mimicked his position. She could have said, you know, we've come a long way and I think that NAFTA did have some real problems. Well, I think she made a political calculation. It was really articulated very well by Senator Chuck Schumer in the summer of 2016 in the lead up to the election. He said, for every blue collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

And you can repeat that in Ohio, in Illinois, in Wisconsin. Can you just translate that? What is he saying about NAFTA's impact on the politics of the parties? I think he's signaling a class realignment of the party. They are going to focus their efforts on winning suburban voters who tend to be wealthier versus the blue collar workers that had traditionally supported the party since the New Deal. That's kind of interesting. So what Democrats are saying explicitly, and this sounds like an on the record quote, is we recognize that we have now become a party whose appeal is to higher income, higher educated

Americans, and we may be forsaking a certain kind of working class voter in Western Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, and we're okay with that because we think the math favors us. Exactly, exactly right. And this kind of thinking was so embedded in Hillary Clinton's campaign that she didn't visit Wisconsin once during the general election. In the end, Trump wins the presidency very narrowly

by flipping three of the so-called blue wall states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This is something no Republican had done in more than 30 years. And I don't think it's a surprise that these states were some of the hardest hit by NAFTA and similar free trade agreements. And Trump did renegotiate NAFTA in 2018 with the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement. It made modest improvements in conditions for Mexican workers to disincentivize

the movement of jobs and factories to Mexico. But it doesn't seem as though that's worked. Last year, for example, Stellantis, one of the big three, moved some production to a plant in Mexico. And of course, Master Lock has closed its Milwaukee factory. But on paper and kind of symbolically to voters, Trump did fulfill a pledge to go after the original NAFTA. That is true and that is what he's campaigning on. Like a lot of Trump's promises, they didn't really ever come through. And he actually passed tax cuts that incentivized offshoring of jobs.

On the Democratic side, you had also a real realignment. President Biden and Vice President Harris increased the tariffs that Trump had established on certain Chinese products, such as electric vehicles. Biden has also emphasized his closeness to labor unions in a way that previous Democrats for generations had not. And he's really courted them and was the first president to walk on the picket line, which is very significant when you think back on the NAFTA debate and Bill Clinton is pushing aside the concerns of organized labor. We should point out that this is a somewhat meaningful thing for Biden to do because he

was in the Senate when NAFTA passed. He voted for NAFTA. He did vote for NAFTA and he voted for the agreement establishing permanent normal trade relations with China. Right. Dan, it feels like Biden's journey here is emblematic of the journey of the entire Democratic party, because what you have by the end of Biden's presidency is a situation where Democrats who brought NAFTA over the line and really gave us our current free trade era under Bill

Clinton, and then who watched Republicans exploit the fallout from it under Donald Trump, Democrats now themselves have said, you know what, this all went too far. And Biden and the Democrats, I'm sure, probably wouldn't put it this way, but their rhetoric now on free trade, on things like NAFTA, has moved a lot closer to Trump's. And I have to believe that's because they now recognize what NAFTA did to the working class. Yeah, I think that's true.

And by the time we enter this campaign, both parties are critical of the free trade agreements of the past. Kamala Harris, one of her first events with Tim Walls, was at a UAW hall in Michigan. And she has really emphasized the importance of good paying jobs. Whether it's too little or too late is an open question. You're talking about 50 years of deindustrialization, and that was greatly accelerated and intensified

by NAFTA and the free trade deals that followed it. If you could say anything to Trump or Kamala Harris about your life and your experiences with master law going up in Milwaukee, what would you tell them? What would you want them to know? One of the main things you people need to do is keep these jobs in the United States, man. These are people's livelihoods. People get up and go to work every day, not even getting paid what they're worth to eat. And then they snatch it, they take it away with ease. And the people that's taken away is well off.

They don't have to worry about these struggles. I think it tells a larger story of American working class disaffection that's rooted in a response to NAFTA. That response isn't always rational or linear. Sometimes it's unpredictable. Trump seized on that, making wild promises that appealed to a lot of people in desperate times.

The Democrats have started to shift away from that, focusing more on what I think is the most underappreciated issue in American politics. And it's so simple and almost banal, but it's really jobs and it's particularly well-paying jobs and what that means to a person that doesn't have a college degree, that sense that they're okay and their family's okay, and who's the best person that's gonna help make those jobs and give them this opportunity. Well Dan, thank you very much, we appreciate it. Thank you Michael, it was really a pleasure

talking with you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. By Monday night, Hurricane Milton had strengthened at an explosive pace, becoming a lethal Category 5 storm with winds of 180 miles per hour. It's just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane. Milton is expected to make landfall on Wednesday. Its exact path is still taking shape, but forecasters predict it will bring life-threatening wind,

rain, and flooding to coastal Florida, where local meteorologist John Morales of NBC News was briefly overcome with emotion as he tried to capture the storm's scale. It has dropped. It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific.

The maximum sustained winds are 100 and... Florida officials have ordered evacuations across at least 12 counties and have suspended tolls in order to keep traffic moving as quickly as possible. What would you say to people tonight who are saying, you know what, I'm going to ride this out, I've ridden others out. What would you say to people who aren't heating those evacuation orders? I can say without any dramatization whatsoever, if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation

areas, you're going to die. Wow. I mean… Today's episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi, Ricky Nowetski, Stella Tan, Claire Tenesketter, and Olivia Natt. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Larissa Anderson. Fact Check by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Marian Lozano, Pat McCusker, Alicia Baitu, Dan Powell, and Diane Wong. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

And Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wondrilly. Special thanks to Nick Pittman and Maddie Masiello. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Boborow. See you tomorrow.