"... the nation’s mayors - most of them Democrats - remain overwhelmingly

Mayors Rise to the Defense of Free Trade

Mayors and private sector leaders in almost all of America’s major metropolitan areas believe they can accelerate growth and expand opportunity by deepening their integration into the world economy, not retreating from it.

Particularly among Democrats, this metropolitan globalism has opened a chasm between the party’s local and national leadership. In the presidential race, Bernie Sanders has unreservedly denounced free trade deals like the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama completed last year; Hillary Clinton has feebly bent in that gale, abandoning her own earlier support for the Pacific agreement. Far fewer congressional Democrats than in the 1990s are backing free trade, too.

But the nation’s mayors—most of them Democrats, especially in the larger cities— remain overwhelmingly committed to free trade in general and the Trans-Pacific Partnership in particular. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has officially endorsed the Pacific pact, and it has drawn enthusiastic praise from big-city Democratic mayors such as Atlanta’s Kasim Reed, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and Tampa’s Bob Buckhorn.

Blocking trade agreements, Cabaldon notes, won’t stop the changes powered by the unrelenting forces of technological advance and global competition. “The notion that you can just freeze your metropolitan economy in place right now, or the way it used to be, is just a fiction we [mayors] can’t live with,” Cabaldon says. “So it’s a question of what are the tools we have to make the best of the opportunities, reduce the suffering from the dislocation and then figure out how to compete.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/clinton-sanders-free-trade/475113/