One worker estimated that half the machinists at his plant were voting for Trump.
One worker estimated that half the machinists at his plant were voting for Trump. arindambanerjee / Shutterstock.com

Erik Lacitis had a great piece out in yesterday's Seattle Times about two Seattle-area machinists voting for Trump.

Here's their reasoning:

“Under Clinton, under Bush, under Obama, middle-class union jobs have been going down,” he says. “None have proposed a solution. Trump comes in, ‘I’ll bring those jobs back.’ ”

Leenders says about the people in his work crew, “Everybody is for Trump,” and guesses that up to half the plant is for Trump, with many of the rest for Sanders — the Democrats’ anti-establishment candidate. He can think of “maybe two people” who are for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Unsurprisingly, Lacitis discovered that criticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—an Obama administration trade deal among 11 Pacific Rim countries and the US—was a common theme in several of his interviews.

Trump's xenophobic, misogynist projectile vomit-speech rarely makes much sense at all, but he has made his opposition to the TPP very clear. And while NAFTA can be credited to diplomatic efforts going back to George H.W. Bush, it was Bill Clinton who ratified it. Both Republicans and Democrats supported the act that made the free trade agreement possible, which may explain why working-class voters who saw manufacturing jobs outsourced abroad don't want more of the same from either party. This lends support to the idea that Bernie Sanders may be the only candidate to beat Trump on Trump's own terms; he's a non-establishment candidate who recognizes that things are fucked.

The perspective in Lacitis's piece may also serve as an important wake-up call for the Democratic party. Last month, Eli Sanders wrote about how conservative elites had turned on their working class counterparts when the National Review published a piece describing the "white American underclass" as "a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles." The takeaway was that Republicans were losing their grip on working class whites they had been juicing for votes, but neglecting, for decades. If voters see Democrats as guilty of the same, the party's in trouble.

Bernie Sanders has made criticism of free-trade agreements a central part of his platform and his career. Hillary Clinton once advocated for the TPP, but has since come out against it.