Tuesday's big winner: an honest economic argument

The truth is that the big winner on Tuesday wasn't Rahm Emanuel or any of the single-issue groups that are claiming to have turned the election. Tuesday's big winner was an honest economic argument.

Advocates of higher minimum wages and those who are routinely dismissed as wild-eyed "anti-globalization" freaks were vindicated in a big, big way on Tuesday.

Yesterday I caught a conference call with a bunch of Congressional winners including Democrat Heath Shuler, who has quite the Southern drawl and who picked up one of those Southern House seats everyone's been squabbling about lately. Shuler said that "without a doubt" trade was "the issue, the hot button issue in every corner of the district." He added: "Every single stump speech began and ended with a discussion of fair trade and every commercial we ran focused on working American families."

There's more than just anecdotal evidence that this is a winning strategy: there was an almost perfect correlation between calling bullshit on the bipartisan trade consensus of the Bush (and Clinton) administration(s) and winning, regardless of party or region. Consider this analysis put out yesterday by Public Citizen (PDF):

• House races where fair traders replaced anti-fair traders: 16 (nine pending)
• Senate races where fair traders replaced anti-fair traders: 5 [now six]
• House races where fair traders took open seats vacated by anti-fair traders: 11
• Senate races where fair traders took open seats vacated by anti-fair traders: 1
• House races where anti-fair traders replaced fair traders: 0
• Senate races where anti-fair traders replaced fair traders: 0

Those included Congressional seats in traditionally "red" states including Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Montana, West Virginia and North Carolina.

On top of the success of so many "fair-traders," all six minimum wage increases passed on state ballots -- with 76 percent of the vote in Missouri and 73 percent in Montana -- despite the decades-long campaign by the corporate right to convince people that minimum wage hikes kill jobs.

Public Citizen gave 100% ratings on trade issues to 10 incumbents who were up for re-election -- 8 Dems, 1 Republican and Bernie Sanders. Look at how they fared:

• Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) - 12 point margin
• Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) - 26 point margin
• Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) - 24 point margin
• Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) - 77 point margin
• Walter Jones (R-N.C.) - 38 point margin
• Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) - 48 point margin
• Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) - 60 point margin
• Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) - 32 point margin
• Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) - 33 point margin
• Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), now Ohio's governor-elect - 23 point margin

No squeakers there.

The reason they did so well is that there's a mile-wide gap separating opinion-shapers and most politicians from ordinary people when it comes to core economic issues like trade. There are a legion of Tom Friedman wannabes who believe that having the words "free trade" attached to a policy makes it good, regardless of what the policy actually entails, and there are tens of millions of Americans -- three quarters of whom don't hold a four-year college degree -- who just see decent jobs disappearing and feel weighed down with more and more economic insecurity. Candidates who speak clearly about these issues are a refreshing change for voters.

And while there's evidence that free trade can bring widespread benefits in theory, U.S. trade policy has centered on lobbyist-written investment agreements posing as free trade deals. As Maude Barlow pointed out (PDF) in a discussion of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), "a variety of corporate committees advise the American negotiators and, under the Trade Advisory Committee system, over 500 corporate representatives have security clearance and access to FTAA negotiating documents." Not so for labor leaders, environmentalists, etc. Ohio Senator-elect Sherrod Brown, who was also on that call yesterday, wrote in his great book, The Myths of Free Trade, that corporate jets crammed with CEOs and lobbyists were stacked up for hours in the air-space above Washington in the lead-up to the vote on NAFTA.