It's hard to get trade deals in the headlines these days. Democrats and Republicans alike have pushed through a series of bad trade deals in recent years, and while there's good reason to believe that voters oppose many aspects of those agreements, it doesn't seem to make much of a dent. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said, the strategy for passing these deals seems to be hiding what's in them from voters, but "if transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States." Well, here's more reason for the crowd that wants to pass more bad-for-American-workers trade deals to keep the details of their plans secret. The Alliance for American Manufacturing has released a poll finding-again-that people want to protect jobs.
Of course, backers of bad trade deals never admit they're going to cost jobs. In fact, they always claim the deals will create jobs-but by now, we've seen enough of these to know that's false. And opponents of declaring other countries (China) to be currency manipulators would say it might jeopardize the U.S. relationship with those other countries (China) in problematic ways. Those voices, in fact, dominate our politics. They get the trade agreements passed without transparency. They go on TV and condescendingly explain that this is a global economy and in a global economy you have to race to the bottom, or you might get left behind. (As if being left behind in a race to the bottom is automatically a terrible thing.)
Polls like this show the deep-seated reservations Americans have about the kind of trade agreements that usually get pushed through without much public input. But usually, regular people aren't asked about this-because they'd give answers politicians don't want to hear.