“Free Trade” is why the Republicans don’t win the Rust Belt and in turn the Presidency. Tell me another Republican who would have one the Rust Belt in 2016?
DING DING DING! The uniparty embrace of “free trade” is why the Rust Belt was blue for as long as it was...
Democrats watched their party march off the lunatic left end, but Republicans gave them no reason to break with their traditional party... so they just disengaged.
The realignment of the Upper Midwest/Rust Belt was LONG LONG overdue, and had the Republican party not been run by neocon idiots, arguing foreign nations dumping their products here was a good thing, because they were taking money from the folks who were making a fortune extracting and selling off the US’s wealth, it would have happened long before 2016.