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“Free trade’sNAFTANAFTANAFTAYour browser does not support the element.just a dandy concept/Advertisers tell us so/Don’t you question, don’t you doubt it/You’re so stupid. You don’t know.” So goes a song Sherrod Brown composed on his guitar back in 1993, when he was a freshman congressman from Ohio helping lead the fight against ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement. The new president, Bill Clinton, was a Democrat, too, and he had agonised during his campaign over the trade deal, negotiated by his Republican predecessor. He eventually came out in support of it while promising to strengthen its protections for workers and the environment. The new protections did not go nearly far enough for Mr Brown, and his song expressed his aggravation with what he saw as a blinkered and patronising uniformity of elite opinion. In the end Mr Clinton rallied enough Democrats to join with most Republicans to ratify the treaty.Mr Brown went on to serve seven terms in the House and then three in Senate, earning a reputation as one of labour’s best friends on Capitol Hill. Rather than wear the official Senate lapel pin, he wears a golden pin given him by a steelworker that depicts a canary in a cage, meant to evoke the days miners had to rely on sudden silence from the birds to alert them to lethal gases. The only trade deal he ever voted for was Donald Trump’s renegotiated version of . But eventually the leadership of his own party swung back in his direction. As a senator Joe Biden voted for , but he turned out, in Mr Brown’s view, to be the most pro-labour president since Lyndon Johnson, if not Franklin Roosevelt.Yet now Mr Brown finds himself in the role, for his party, of sacrificial canary. In his Senate race in Ohio, he ran more than seven points ahead of the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. But he still lost to Bernie Moreno, a businessman, in a state that not long ago went for Barack Obama twice. Democrats’ leftward lurch on economic policy did not stop Donald Trump from gaining ground with working-class voters. A national post-election poll by YouGov found that Americans without college degrees saw Democrats as more out of touch and extreme than Republicans, and as less likely to “fight for people like me”.Mr Brown has no patience for the argument that working-class Americans who supported Republicans voted against their own interests. “I shoot people on my staff who say that,” he says, laughing in his Senate office, where surviving staff have been packing up mementoes accumulated across his 32 years in Congress. “It is insulting to people to say, ‘You’re too dumb.’” Mr Brown thinks Democrats’ problem started with . Over the past 30 years, the party alienated working people, the base of its coalition for generations, by not fighting harder to protect their jobs and return to them the rewards of rising productivity. “Workers have understood that the Republican Party is the party of the rich, and Democrats were supposed to be the party of workers,” he says, so they had higher expectations of it. Now, “off the coasts, they just think that we’re a bi-coastal elite party. And that’s hard to shake.”Mr Clinton had reason to advocate freer trade, having witnessed its power to spread prosperity as governor of a poor southern state, Arkansas. But over time Democrats’ attention drifted away from those who were swamped rather than lifted by the rising tide. “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” Hillary Clinton said proudly in 2018, looking back on her loss to Mr Trump in 2016. From Roosevelt up through Mr Clinton himself, that would have registered within her party as more of a lament than a boast.Despite their embrace of industrial policy and unions, Mr Biden and Ms Harris could not overcome the party’s image in one term, Mr Brown says, and the president’s own policies often got in the way. His decision to suspend tariffs levied by Mr Trump on Chinese solar panels delighted the party’s environmentalists but undercut domestic manufacturers, including in Ohio. For Mr Brown the Biden administration went too far in regulating power-plant emissions, and not far enough in restricting imports of Chinese electric cars.Mr Brown also thinks the White House failed for too long to empathise with Americans’ dismay at rising grocery prices, and that in general Democrats do not realise how condescending their approach to non-professional workers can seem. “They think we see them as a sort of charity case,” he says. Beyond the rumpled hair and raspy voice, hallmarks of a style that seems unpractised even after decades of execution, Mr Brown’s own approach has been to log countless hours in union halls and to emphasise “the dignity of work”. He likes to quote Martin Luther King: “No labour is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages”. He tells stories about the pride blue-collar workers take in having helped build a stadium or a bridge and wonders why Democrats do not make more effort to celebrate those sorts of contributions.In previous elections, Mr Brown’s record of fighting for pension rights or the Earned Income Tax Credit helped protect him against concerns he was to the left of his constituents on gun control or gay rights. “People are complicated, and people can hold a variety of different, contradictory ideas,” he says. Even in 2024, Mr Brown felt he weathered attacks over transgender athletes and illegal immigration. “The ad that beat us,” Mr Brown says, was one that declared a vote for Mr Brown to be a vote against Mr Trump. “There was no really good answer for that,” he says.Mr Brown believes Democrats can fight their way back, because Republicans will not deliver in the end. “Are they going to be protecting the right to organise?” he scoffs. Probably not. But given the Democrats’ erratic record, it was neither stupid nor dumb to give Republicans this chance to prove themselves.
