Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said working class voters in Ohio will see “the big picture on jobs and the big picture on manufacturing and the big picture on trade, they’re going to see a few sort of shallow words from Trump, but they’re going to see a lifelong commitment to workers from Hillary Clinton.”
Partial transcript as follows:
TAPPER: Cheating China, fighting back. Later on in the ad, it talks about tariffs, imposing tariffs on China. To be frank, that sounds a lot more like Donald Trump than it does Hillary Clinton. How are you going to be able to convince your voters, your working-class voters in Ohio, to vote for her, when they seem to agree more with you and him on the issue of trade?
BROWN: Well, I wouldn’t characterize my position as close to Donald Trump’s. I — he is highly critical of China. He talks about big tariffs, doesn’t go any deeper than that. His — his analysis or his solutions — and, again, look what he does with his own businesses and with his own outsourcing of jobs. But the real issue is, I trust Hillary Clinton on trade and manufacturing because I see her plan. She wants a trade prosecutor to enforce rules and trade laws. She wants to triple the enforcement budgets at the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission. She has specific reasons about her opposition to Trans-Pacific Partnership, currency, lack of currency provisions, rules of origin, which is really important in this region of the country with autos. She has been up, and she — clearly, on manufacturing, she has a real — an in-depth plan about how to bring manufacturing to this country. Trump has words, but there’s not really any depth there. And that’s why I trust Hillary to do this rightTAPPER: Well, Senator, in-depth plans are all fine and good, but, as I don’t need to tell you, when you go out there and talk to working-class men and women in Ohio, people who think that the deck has been stacked against them by the Washington elite, Democrats or Republicans, selling their jobs down the river, whether they’re going to Mexico or China, a lot of them seem to be very skeptical of Hillary Clinton, and willing to listen to Donald Trump. Are you not concerned about that?
BROWN: Oh, of course I’m always concerned in an election. It’s — I’m just — I’m just greatly concerned that Donald Trump will be the nominee of a major political party in this country. And anything can happen in an election. But I also know that — that Secretary Clinton will work on these trade enforcement issues in a way that — and will oppose these trade agreements in understanding how to do that, which Donald Trump has never really offered.
I also know that, when you talk to working-class audiences in Ohio, when they start thinking about this in the next four months, Donald Trump has been against the minimum wage. Now he’s kind of all over the place, but he’s fundamentally against. He said wages are too high, so he clearly has been against the minimum wage. He might act like he changed his position.
He’s against prevailing wage, which will be — attack right at the heart of the building trades, the people that build our roads and construct our buildings. He’s for right-to-work, which is a dagger in the heart of working-class Ohioans. So, I think, when they see the big picture on jobs and the big picture on manufacturing and the big picture on trade, they’re going to see a few sort of shallow words from Trump, but they’re going to see a lifelong commitment to workers from Hillary Clinton. And that’s why I trust her to do this right. That’s why I endorsed her early. That’s why I campaign hard with her, particularly in the industrial manufacturing, unionized parts of Ohio in the Northeast. And that’s where she’s going to run her margins up and win this state.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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