Trade is An Issue That Links Sanders and Trump

Pollsters had a heap of explaining to do after Sen. Bernie Sanders defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Michigan's Democratic primary, beating odds that pollsters had put at 99-to-one.

Polls had Clinton leading Sanders by anywhere from 5 percent to 37 percent in the final week. He won by 50 percent to 48 percent.

Poll aggregator Nate Silver's site FiveThirtyEight.com said, "By most measures, it's the biggest polling miss in a primary in modern political history."

What went wrong? The possibilities tell us a lot about the unique nature of this presidential campaign cycle.

They include an underestimation of youth turnout, a failure to call enough cellphones as well as landlines, an underestimation of how many independents would vote and a failure to poll after Sunday, missing the impact of the Clinton-Sanders debate in Flint.

Crossover voters also threw forecasts off. Some 7 percent of Republican primary voters identified themselves as Democrats to exit pollsters, compared to only 4 percent in the Democratic primary who said they were Republicans.

Call it strategic voting. After the polls indicated Clinton was a shoo-in, some Democrats in Ann Arbor on Election Day told me they were voting for Sanders to send a message to Clinton, or for Republican Gov. John Kasich from neighboring Ohio to send a message to the Grand Old Party's frontrunner Donald Trump.

Bernie Porn, president of Lansing-based EPIC-MRA, which polled for the Detroit Free Press, supported that theory but said the exit-poll samples were too small to check it out.

Significantly, pollsters underestimated Sanders's support among black voters. After YouGov and Mitchell Research and Communications found Sanders had less than 20 percent of black voters, the same percentage he had won in most states that have large black populations, Sanders actually won 28 percent.

That tends to support my theory about Sanders' black support. The former civil rights activist and avowed "democratic socialist" is nowhere near as well known in black communities as Hillary Clinton. But the more African-Americans get to know him, the more they are appear to like him.

But the most decisive factor, interestingly enough, may have been the sleeper issue of the year. Trump on the right and Sanders on the left have beat their drums with equal outrage over an issue with which they have broken with their own parties: the downside of trade agreements.

Trade proved to be a "late-breaking issue" that turned a lot of voters away from Clinton, EPIC/MRA's Porn told the Free Press.

CNN's exit polls found that 58 percent of Michigan voters believed trade with other countries costs jobs, compared to 30 percent who believed it creates them. Trump and Sanders won majorities of those who believe trade costs jobs.

Trade is an issue in which where you stand depends on where you sit -- economically, educationally and geographically. Those who have a high school diploma or less have seen their employment and promotion opportunities dry up since the 1950s as big employers like Detroit's once-robust auto industry have moved overseas or to other states that have lower labor costs.

Sanders calls NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP and other major trade deals a "disaster" that have put American wages on a race to the bottom. Trump promises to raise tariffs and be a tougher negotiator, particularly with China.

But those who are attracted to such tougher trade talk should be careful what they wish for. Americans learned a hard lesson with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that raised tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods. The result was a disastrous trade war as our trading partners retaliated with new tariffs of their own.

Many experts on the right and left agree that Smoot-Hawley made the Great Depression even worse. It certainly didn't help make things better.

Americans have benefitted from lower prices and new industries made possible by changing trade policies in recent decades. But while some people are movers and shakers, as my factory-worker father used to say, others get moved and shaken. Responsible political leaders need to help lower-skilled workers who have been left adrift by economic changes -- before the demagogues get to them.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)