Several trade-wary Democrats, flush from victory in this week's congressional elections, promised on Wednesday to fight for US manufacturing jobs and to take a tough stance on the Bush administration's free trade agenda.
"I think we're going to see major trade fights in both houses," Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who won a Senate seat on Tuesday, told reporters in a conference call the day after mid-term elections gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives. The Senate outcome was unclear, but Democrats were on the brink of gaining a majority there as well.
Brown made opposition to the Bush administration's trade agenda a campaign cornerstone, pledging not to budge on what he calls "job-killing trade agreements."
All Democrats may not oppose trade deals as ardently as Brown, but new trade deals have been a harder and harder sell in recent years for the Bush administration.
Democratic leaders, like New York Rep. Charles Rangel who is expected to head the House Ways and Means Committee, are promising to reach across the aisle on trade.
But some analysts expect that Bush's agenda, including a deal in the frozen Doha Round of world trade talks, will be derailed, especially with the administration's trade negotiating authority expiring next year.
Brown, who unsuccessfully opposed deals like the US-Central American trade accord CAFTA, says increased trade has cost his industrial state tens of thousands of jobs.
Brown and other newly elected lawmakers, in a call organised by Citizens' Trade Campaign, an umbrella group of labour, farm and environmental interests, said trade had resonated more than ever before in the lead-up to Tuesday's election.
Heath Shuler, elected to a North Carolina House seat, said trade was a "hot-button issue" in his state where he said 170,000 people have lost manufacturing jobs in recent years.
Opposition to trade deals increasingly comes from "rural communities with deep anxiety about what this economy is doing to them and (the perception that) Washington really doesn't give a damn," Brown said.
"The bottom line is that nation-wide candidates won by ... actively opposing the status quo" on existing trade deals, said Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch.