FLINT, MICHIGAN—There are a lot of theories being thrown around as to the source of Bernie Sanders' pundit-defying upset in Michigan. There are people who say that a lot of Democratic voters threw their support to John Kasich in order to screw with He, Trump because they thought Hillary Rodham Clinton had the Democratic primary safely in the satchel. There certainly is no question that Sanders' emphasis on the damage done by international trade deals had a particular salience in Michigan. Here, of course, the crisis in the city's water supply was a wild card. Turnout in the Democratic primary was so massive that precincts in Flint ran out of Democratic ballots, and HRC won Genesee County narrowly. But, as I roamed around this particular city, I kept hearing from various members of the United Auto Workers that another factor may have been at work.

During Sunday night's debate, HRC hit Bernie Sanders with something of a cheap shot—David Axelrod's term, and mine—regarding the auto bailout. (In merciful brief, Sanders supported a bill bailing out the auto industry as a stand-alone measure. The auto bailout eventually got folded into the release of the second part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and Sanders voted against that, on the grounds that the Wall Street bailout included in the TARP program lacked sufficient government oversight, which it did.) At the time, the argument was considered something of a well-timed coup for the Clinton campaign, blunting Sanders' ferocious attacks on Clinton-era trade policies.

But, as I talked to more and more people around Flint, I got the sense that the resonance of the exchange was not what HRC and her campaign thought it would be. The UAW members I talked to clearly considered HRC's use of the auto bailout against Sanders to be at best a half-truth, and a cynical attempt to win their support, and they were offended by what they saw as a glib attempt to turn the state's economic devastation into a campaign weapon. These were people who watched the auto industry flee this city and this state, and they knew full well how close the country's remaining auto industry came to falling apart completely in 2008 and 2009. They knew this issue because they'd lived it, and they saw through what the HRC campaign was trying to do with the issue. I have no data to support how decisive this feeling was in Tuesday night's returns, but it seems to me to be one of the more interesting examples of unintended consequences that I'd heard in a while.

In any case, the focus of the campaign on both sides, at least for the next month, and in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and (to a lesser extent) Missouri, is going to sharpen on the issues of globalization, trade and their assorted consequences. All of the candidates are going to have to sharpen their positions accordingly. (If Kasich continues to rise, his support for right-to-work laws in Ohio is bound to come up.) The auto workers in Michigan have run out of patience with platitudes and easy answers. At least on one side of it, this is becoming an election for people who see past the politics all the way into their own lives. That's what I learned in Flint, anyway.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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