Voting on economic unease in Tuesday primaries
MORAINE, Ohio - A long line stretched across the parking lot outside a massive factory here, once a General Motors Corp. plant churning out Chevy Blazers, now producing windshields for Fuyao Glass America, a Chinese company.
MORAINE, Ohio - A long line stretched across the parking lot outside a massive factory here, once a General Motors Corp. plant churning out Chevy Blazers, now producing windshields for Fuyao Glass America, a Chinese company.
The people weren't there looking for jobs, but for answers: how to bring back Ohio's shrinking industrial base, the foundation of the middle class, and get wages growing again.
"What can they do is the question," said Richard Franks, 60, an engineer who was waiting Friday to hear Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, the state's governor.
"We're getting killed on trade, and companies are relocating to China and Mexico," Franks said. "You can't compete with Mexico where workers get 200 pesos [about $11.30] a day. How can you compete with that?"
Economic unease is the driving campaign issue in Ohio, which holds pivotal primaries for both parties on Tuesday, with the debate focusing on free-trade deals and whether they have left U.S. workers behind.
Ohio and two other Rust Belt states that vote the same day, Illinois and Missouri, have shed hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs since President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Signs are scattered through the Midwest: padlocked factories and steel mills, frayed neighborhoods in old industrial cities.
A CNN/ORC poll last week showed that jobs and the economy were the top concerns of 42 percent of the likely voters in each primary here. In 2015, Ohio lost 115,000 jobs due to free-trade deals such as NAFTA and normalized trading relations with China, according to a study released this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank.
"Trade is a critical issue in Ohio," said David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. "We still make stuff here, and we have that mind-set. You've got a lot of people who feel left behind, betrayed."
GOP front-runner Donald Trump has made opposition to "bad trade deals" a major theme of his campaign and is hitting the theme hard in Ohio, attacking Kasich, who voted for NAFTA as a congressman and favors free trade.
"We have trade deficits with every country we do business with," Trump said Saturday at a rally in Cleveland. "Any direction I can point to, you're losing jobs, you're losing your plants. We're not going to let it happen anymore." Trump wants to impose tariffs on goods made abroad by American companies that have relocated.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has been railing against trade agreements, which make it easier for companies to move factories and goods across borders. Sanders has put Hillary Clinton on the defensive - she has supported NAFTA, normalized trade with China, and the pending 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership with Asian nations.
But Clinton, the former secretary of state, first lady, and U.S. senator, now says she opposes the TPP and wants to amend it to protect the American auto industry, recovering from the recession of 2008 after a taxpayer-funded bailout.
"We don't need to tinker with this agreement," Sanders said Saturday. "We need to defeat it. We need an entirely new trade policy that creates jobs in this country, not more low-wage jobs abroad."
The trade issue figured in Sanders' upset victory last week over Clinton in Michigan and in Trump's as well. In Michigan, exit polls for the first time asked voters whether they thought foreign-trade agreements created or took away American jobs. The faction who said that trade was destructive made up 55 percent of the Republican primary vote and 57 percent of the Democratic primary vote. Trump and Sanders carried solid majorities of these voters.
Overall, most economists agree that free trade is a net creator of jobs for the U.S. and brings other benefits, such as lower prices for goods. But, as Niven said, it often causes disruptions in regions or industries, and the benefits are not evenly distributed. Sometimes the jobs that replace manufacturing position are not as good.
Ohio has had impressive job gains since Kasich became governor in January 2011 - about 400,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the unemployment rate dropping by half - but at the same time, wages have been declining or flat for more than a decade.
Since 1999, median household income in Ohio dropped more than 16 percent when adjusted for inflation - the second-biggest decline in the nation, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The declines were steeper in heavy manufacturing counties, such as Montgomery, home to Moraine and Dayton.
In line at the plant, Franks said that his small factory making lightweight aluminum for aircraft components is doing well, but he's concerned about the manufacturing sector overall. "We need a president who stands up for America, for starters," he said.
Franks, a Republican, is leaning toward Trump, though he thinks Kasich has done a good job in Ohio.
Pam Tipton, 67, attending a Trump rally Saturday at Dayton International Airport, recalled when the area hummed with manufacturing - in addition to GM, there was Frigidaire, National Cash Register, and a host of other firms.
"We had it all," she said. "Now all the manufacturing goes to Mexico, and then they come here and get a lot of the jobs we have left, and send money back to their families."
Tipton, likes that Trump wants to bring back manufacturing. She feels the economy is rigged against working people like her.
"When I got out of high school, kids could make it onto International Harvester in Springfield or could go to GM and have a good job that would support their families and build a good middle-class life," Tipton said. "What jobs are there now for kids who don't go to college?"
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