President Barack Obama will have to hope America’s mayors are a little more convincing than he’s been.

Faced with House Democrats who aren’t buying the administration’s efforts to draw a connection between global trade and local job growth, big-city mayors — most of them Democrats — are stepping up. In the final push ahead of the fast-track vote expected this month, they’re ramping up the pressure in public and reaching out directly to members in an effort to help sway a few final votes.


With the exception of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who’s put opposing the trade deal in the “progressive agenda” he’s promoting around the country, nearly every big city mayor is supporting Obama’s trade push—most of them overlapping with the liberal House Democrats who’ve been leading the charge against Trade Promotion Authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The lawmakers who are planning to vote no just don’t get it, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said in an interview. He and other mayors like San Francisco’s Ed Lee and Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti are out in their communities every day and know that a new rush of imports and exports will transform their ports and local manufacturing bases.

“If I’m talking about an issue, if Ed Lee’s talking about an issue, Mayor Garcetti’s talking about an issue, if mayors across the country are talking about this, I think we have a different level of credibility than many folks in Washington,” Reed said.

Reed said he’s headed soon to Los Angeles to meet with Garcetti and divvy up a list of phone calls to members of Congress.

“We have a list of congressional members who are opposed, we have a list of those that haven’t made their opinion known, and we will break up that list based on who has the personal relationships with members,” Reed said of his plan with Garcetti.

The White House didn’t start out targeting mayors on trade, seeing them at first as just one part of a wider outreach to business groups, state and city politicians and union local chapters.

It’s mayors, though, who have emerged as key surrogates to turn up pressure on Congress.

“They just have a natural platform, so they can do things that a local business leader or even a prominent business leader cannot,” said Greg Nelson, a senior adviser for the White House’s National Economic Council who’s been focusing on trade.

“A conversation in Houston or Tampa or Sacramento is much different conversation than here,” Nelson said. “It’s not about some notions of presidential authority, or how does this fit into 25 years of congressional voting, but much more: ‘What is this going to mean for my community?’”

With visits from Cabinet secretaries to help generate local headlines and support, White House officials have been leaning on mayors to get members of Congress to believe the polls that show the resistance in Washington doesn’t reflect what Americans want, and that the threats of political repercussion from the opposition don’t have a lot of weight.

“It’s really trying to help them feel confident about it and that there is in fact support here for these type of agreements,” said Marilyn Strickland, mayor of Tacoma, Washington, who’s still hoping to help bring along the four members of her state’s delegation who are on the fence.

“The minute you get sworn in, you are pro trade,” Strickland joked. “As you start to look at the types of jobs that are tied to trade, they tend to pay better, and they’re a necessity for us in Washington state.”

Reed and Strickland were among the mayors brought to the White House for a session in the Old Executive Office Building held during the U.S. Conference of Mayors winter meeting where officials laid out their case and asked for help.

The morning after Obama made his pitch for trade in the State of the Union in January, United States Trade Representative Mike Froman spoke to the full conference, telling them he didn’t think he needed to spend a lot of time convincing them of the benefits of trade —“while pundits are pontificating about Main Street,” he said, “you’re paving Main Street.”

Separately, Froman met at the hotel with mayors including Dallas’ Mike Rawlings and Baltimore’s Stephanie Rawlings-Blake — now also among the local backers of the administration’s trade agenda.

No outreach strategy was formalized, but mayors have stayed in touch with Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett and her intergovernmental staff, with mayors like Reed, Garcetti and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter at the center of the effort.

“For us, it’s not about partisan ideology or special interests. It’s about results,” said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who’s been helping lead the charge for the Conference of Mayors, which has officially endorsed TPA and TPP and been doing its own pairing of mayors with members of Congress in what Conference executive director Tom Cochran calls “just straight lobbying.”

“We may not always change minds,” Landrieu said, “but at least we’re making sure an important point of view is heard.”

Mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter (right) and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (left) speak to members of the media at the White House in 2014. | Getty

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has been one of the most involved mayors pushing for trade.

“What I do know is trade going from Philadelphia to other places in the world is going to get loaded on the ship by longshoremen at our port, or may be brought by truck by a teamster. Businesses are going to grow,” Nutter said. “I’m the mayor of Philadelphia — I don’t get to have a lot of the higher-level philosophical kinds of debates that sometimes take place in the Congress.”

So far, he, like most of the others, doesn’t have much to show for it: Rep. Brendan Boyle, the only Pennsylvania Democrat in the House who was still on the fence announced Tuesday he’s voting no, and nearby Rep. John Carney, whose home state of Delaware is largely tied to the Philadelphia economy, remains undecided despite both his home state senators and Delaware’s own Vice President Joe Biden supporting the deal.

People at the White House “always encourage us to start with your own members, your own delegation,” Nutter said. “I’ll be taking a second or third round of discussions with my own delegation to see if we can get some movement.”