WASHINGTON – There is more at stake in the race between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders than simply who will top the Democratic Party’s ticket in November.
It’s a battle to control the direction the party will take over the next decade, and to define and shape the party’s core message.
As Sanders and Biden compete for the primary prize of Michigan’s 125 pledged delegates on Tuesday, nowhere is there more significant, and potentially consequential, distance between the two men than there is on trade policy.
Sanders has spent his career leading the opposition to foreign trade deals. In Congress, he has voted against every trade agreement that has come to the floor in the past three decades, save for a 2011 South Korea vote that he sat out.