Sen. Kamala Harris said the U.S. can negotiate trade agreements better than NAFTA to protect American workers. | Paul Sancya/AP Photo 2020 Elections Kamala Harris: ‘I would not have voted for NAFTA’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris said Sunday that she would not have voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

On CNN‘s “State of the Union,“ the California Democrat said the U.S. can negotiate better trade agreements to protect American workers.


“We need to do a better job in terms of thinking about the priorities that should be more apparent now than perhaps they were then, which are issues like the climate crisis and what we need to build into these trade agreements,” Harris said.

NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994, liberalized trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico by eliminating nearly all tariff and nontariff barriers on merchandise trading. A proposed replacement for NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, was signed in November 2018 but still needs to be approved by Congress.