Indiana Tells Bernie Sanders to Stay in the Race, and Keep Talking About Trade
John Nichols
http://www.thenation.com/article/indiana-tells-bernie-sanders-to-stay-in-the-race-and-keep-talking-about-trade/
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On a primary night when media coverage focused obsessively on billionaire Donald Trump’s “big” win in the Indiana Republican primary (a win that formalized his status as the GOP’s presumed nominee), Sanders was running only slightly less well among Democrats than Trump was with Republicans. The Vermonter was carrying the vast majority of Indiana’s counties and winning blue-collar towns that have been battered by the North American Free Trade Agreement, permanent normalization of trade with China, and a host of other global agreements that have undermined workers, communities, the environment and democracy itself.
The trade issue was vital for Sanders in Indiana, as it was for him in Michigan—the state that shook up the race in March by handing the senator a surprise victory over Clinton. Exit polls found that nearly two-thirds of Indiana Democratic primary voters said Wall Street hurts the economy, and 46 percent said free-trade policies costs jobs.
Sanders has made his opposition to the trade policies long favored by so many Republican and Democratic party leaders a core tenet of his presidential run from the day he announced his candidacy. During the course of the long battle for the Democratic nomination, Clinton has moved toward a more critical stance on trade issues—raising objections to the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal that she had once talked up as a potential “gold-standard” agreement. But Sanders has been unrelenting in his opposition to the TPP and past agreements, which he ardently opposed as a member of the House and Senate.
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Since the enactment of NAFTA during former President Bill Clinton’s first term, Sanders noted, Indiana had lost 113,000 manufacturing jobs.
