That seems to reflect the Democratic Party’s current crisis on trade, with even most of the people running for the presidential nomination unable to articulate a clear vision of what America’s approach should be. The Atlantic asked 23 Democratic presidential candidates whether they support TPP and would want to restart negotiations if elected, and received only some definitive responses. Of the people who were firm in their answers, former Representative John Delaney of Maryland is the only one who said yes.

Several candidates’ campaigns didn’t provide answers on their current position on TPP despite repeated requests: South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; and Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

Of the definitive responses, Julián Castro, who was in Obama’s Cabinet during the TPP push, said that although he sees the value of “vigorous trade,” he wouldn’t support the deal as originally negotiated. Was Obama wrong to have pushed for it? “No,” said the former secretary of housing and urban development. “That’s what the administration believed was an improvement. That trade agreement was an improvement over NAFTA in its labor provisions, its environmental provisions—but we’re going to keep getting stronger. We’re not going to settle for the standards of the past.”

Delaney explained his outlier “yes” in terms of a “Trump vision of the world versus the Obama vision of the world.” The former president “became really good at understanding the U.S. role globally and how you tie economic relations to global relations to economic security,” Delaney said. “I don’t think you can actually take on Trump unless you are for the TPP, because I don’t think you can actually say, ‘Your vision of the world is wrong if you basically opposed Obama’s vision of the world.’ I actually thought we lost the election over it last time.”

Trade was one of the most divisive, definitive issues in the 2016 Democratic-primary campaign—and in the general election. Both Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont tapped into decades of simmering rage over gutted manufacturing towns, declaring their opposition to trade agreements such as NAFTA and TPP that they say are bad for the American worker. In the early days of the Democratic primary, when Biden was still rumored to jump into the race, Hillary Clinton was spooked enough to announce her opposition to TPP. She wanted to box him out and protect her support from unions—even though she’d helped lead the early negotiations for the deal. The anti-trade edges of the Democratic and Republican bases converged, and America seemed to be moving firmly away from its traditional leadership on global trade.

Trade opponents tended to have the loudest voices in 2016, and they were concentrated in states that have become the hottest battlegrounds for general elections, including Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. But they didn’t—and they don’t—represent the full picture of where Americans are on trade. For example, in public polls, younger voters are consistently much more open to global trade. And the debate over TPP was often framed in simplistic terms, eliding the details of an agreement that involved 12 countries, in which all agreed to a baseline of standards about workers’ rights and proper working conditions—a baseline seen, among opponents on the left, as settling for the lowest common denominator.