As they campaign across Michigan other upcoming Midwest primary states, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, both candidates are already working to make their case against likely Republican nominee Donald Trump. | AP Trump poses Rust Belt threat, Democrats worry On eve of Michigan primary, the specter of the GOP front-runner hangs over the Democratic race.

DETROIT — Bernie Sanders sees an opportunity to gain ground on Hillary Clinton by focusing on blue-collar workers in the industrial Midwest, the working class voters who once went by the title of Reagan Democrats.

The same goes for Donald Trump.


The specter of Trump's possible appeal in the region is hanging over the Democratic campaign in the days before the March 8 Michigan primary – and in advance of upcoming primaries in Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri — as Clinton and Sanders barnstorm all corners of the region, ripping through a debate over trade policy and the roots of the area’s economic struggles.

The topic was front and center Sunday night when Clinton and Sanders debated in Flint, with Sanders calling out specific job losses to China and Mexico, and the pair sparring over their positions on the auto industry bailout.

For Clinton, who owns a commanding delegate lead, there’s a special urgency to the discussion: the region is seen as a proving ground for some of the themes that stand to animate an increasingly likely Clinton-Trump general election battle.

Among Democrats, there’s a growing suspicion that an unpredictable Trump candidacy focused on economic protectionism and opposition to trade deals could potentially put blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Pennsylvania into a swing-state column that includes Ohio.

“I don’t think you can take Michigan for granted, even though it’s gone Democrat for the last five cycles,” warned Michigan Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon on Friday, pointing to the Republican front-runner’s resonance with Michiganders when he talks about outsourcing and manufacturing jobs.

“Both Trump and Sanders have tapped into this incredible anger that exists out there,” added Michigan pollster Steve Mitchell. Trump “was in Warren, the center of Macomb County, talking about the fact that Ford just shifted some jobs into Mexico. These auto workers have seen jobs move out of Michigan, and out of the country, so the convenient scapegoat for that is trade deals. There was a strong opposition to NAFTA and CAFTA — and other trade deals that were done — among the UAW [members]."

“These are issues that are certainly going to be part of the general election if it’s Clinton vs. Trump,” he explained.

The central issue in the region’s debate thus far has been Clinton’s past support for those multi-national trade deals — which Sanders has repeatedly said are a major source of Michigan’s economic troubles — and outsourcing — a topic that Sanders has aimed to exploit by circulating a 2012 clip of Clinton appearing to praise it in India. The goal for the Vermont senator’s campaign is similar to Trump's: appealing to those angry industrial workers who have fallen on hard times in recent years, particularly in Michigan, the state hardest-hit by the American auto industry’s struggles.

Echoing the message he’s been espousing in ads, rallies, and press conferences all across the state — including in places like Traverse City, Sanders on Sunday took to the pages of the Detroit Free Press to respond to the paper’s endorsement of Clinton and insist that “unfettered free trade turned this once-prosperous middle-class city, where residents could own a home, raise a family and retire with security, into a place where good jobs are scarce and extreme poverty is high."

“The decimation of Detroit, Flint and communities all over this country did not happen by accident. It is a direct result of disastrous trade deals that have allowed corporations to ship jobs to low-wage countries. Since I have been in Congress, I’ve helped lead the opposition to these trade agreements. Not only did I vote against them, I stood with workers on picket lines in opposition to them. Meanwhile, Secretary Clinton sided with corporate America and supported almost all of them,” Sanders continued, adding statistics about how many tens of thousands of lost jobs he attributed to Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois due to NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China — two policies supported by Clinton.

While Trump has not zeroed in on Clinton’s past support for trade deals in such a targeted fashion, he has hit similar notes while decrying the decimation of the American auto industry due to such policies: “Mexico is becoming car capital of the world, whether you like it or not. What’s happened to you people is disgraceful,” he told a crowd in Warren on Friday -- a conspicuous appearance in Macomb County, the archetypal home of Reagan Democrats. “If you get laid off on Tuesday, I still want your vote. I’ll get you a good job."

To Michigan’s political experts, the direction of the debate is unsurprising — and even familiar. Previous high profile races in the state offer Clinton clues about how to respond, some said, pointing specifically to the 2006 gubernatorial election here.

“This is the race I ran,” said former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm — now a Clinton backer and advisor to pro-Clinton super PAC Correct The Record — pointing to her re-election campaign against businessman Dick DeVos. “I ran against a billionaire, and the billionaire outsourced jobs to China, said he was a job creator. Trump is doing the same thing, so those are fighting words in Michigan. It would be easy to expose the con."

In a state that Sanders has long identified as a promising target for his message, the former secretary of state and her team have designed her pushback so far to focus on enforcement of trade deals and solutions to their problems, rather than blame — the idea is to avoid having the conversation settle on her past support for those trade deals.

“She’s got an answer to [Sanders’] anti-trade stand. He, and Trump too, want to build a wall,” said Granholm. “If you want to build products that are exported, and build them in the U.S., you have to push for fair trade."

And during Sunday night's debate, Clinton went even further, reminding voters for the first time that Sanders voted against the auto bailout. It was a line of attack that undermined Republican nominee Mitt Romney's chances in Michigan against Barack Obama in 2012 – and it was of particular note considering that the state's politically powerful United Auto Workers union has yet to endorse a candidate.

Previewing a message on Friday that could easily be adapted for a general election against Trump, Clinton unveiled a so-called “new bargain” for manufacturing jobs in a Detroit address on Friday while proposing a tax clawback scheme that would reinvest money from corporations that moved jobs or assets overseas into communities that are negatively hit by those moves.

“There are people in both parties who think we can somehow shut ourselves off from the world, but even if the United States never signs another trade deal, globalization isn’t going away,” she said, apparently referring to Sanders and Trump, and seeking to appeal directly to the middle-class workers at the center of the fight, before reminding the audience that she opposed CAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“Our challenge is to establish and enforce fair rules so that our workers compete on a level playing field and countries don’t race to the bottom on labor, the environment, and so much else. The way we enforce trade deals is completely backward. We’ve put the burden of initiating trade cases on workers and unions, and we don’t take action until after the damage is done, which often means after the worker is laid off. That is ridiculous — the government should be enforcing the law from the beginning, so workers can focus on doing their jobs."

To the state’s Democrats who are already nervously looking ahead to November, this serves as the beginning of an argument, but they say it’s not yet enough to inoculate Clinton from worries that Trump — who likes to brag about his work expanding the Republican electorate — could start to make similar states competitive.

“[Trump] is being strategic about his audience,” said Granholm. “It is clear there are middle-class folks — white guys, but also African-Americans — who were displaced by the auto meltdown. But Trump was against the auto rescue. Those should be disqualifying words. They were for Mitt Romney, and they will be for him."