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Chris Slevin and Todd Tucker co-authored a January 2007 article, The Fair Trade Sweep, showing that strong Fair Trade candidates significantly outperformed both weak Fair Trade candidates and anti-Fair Trade candidates. This was an analysis of the 2006 elections when the Democrats re-took the Senate and the House.
Slevin is now Senator Sherrod Brown's trade staffer. He was
previously with Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, which is headed by
Lori Wallach. Tucker is still with Global Trade Watch.
While the piece has a partisan Dem perspective, it does not invalidate the analysis.
[I]n 73 percent of the races where Democrats successfully dislodged an incumbent Republican, the Democrat in the race made a strong fair trade message a campaign priority (receiving either an A+ or an A). At the same time, in 72 percent of the races where the incumbent Republican emerged victorious, the Democrat in the race was much weaker on the fair trade issue, receiving a B, C, D or F.
The flagging popularity of the Iraq War did not explain the election results.
And while nearly all Democrats ran on a platform that emphasized criticism of the Iraq War, the difference between those war-critic Democrats that won and those who lost was the strength of their trade and economic message. War criticism was a necessary but insufficient basis for electoral support; anyone who thought that merely being opposed to a war of choice that is costing American lives would carry the day was proved wrong. It's not enough to be against something; voters want to know what candidates are for. A fair trade position was an indicator to voters that a candidate was serious about being for the middle class.
At the time, the Dem leadership may not have understood the power of the trade issue.
Politics, as DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel points out, is not a business in which you bat 100 percent. Still, the stated reason for the DCCC's focus (and in turn, the focus of many other donors and Democratic-leaning groups that follow the DCCC's lead) on specific candidates from Tammy Duckworth to Ken Lucas and beyond was that these races were deemed "winnable."14 In contrast, fair trade groups looked beyond the party leadership's top tier and focused on promoting and lending organizing resources to Democrats who recognized the failures of the NAFTA-WTO model and actively embraced a fair trade message. While several of these races were not deemed winnable by leaders in Democratic circles, nearly all of these candidates ended up winning or coming very close to winning.
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