DaytonDailyNews.com

WASHINGTON — Sen. Sherrod Brown swept to victory in 2006 with a campaign theme that proved golden to Democrats across the country.

Brown, a Democrat, and 36 other "fair-traders" beat incumbents with populist rhetoric and oft-repeated phrases like "job-killing trade agreements."

According to Global Trade Watch, a progressive nonprofit policy organization, candidates aired more than 25 paid campaign ads on trade.

It didn't stop there. The Ohio Democratic primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in March seemed not so much about who was better for the state as who hated the North American Free Trade Agreement more.

Not since Ross Perot railed against the "giant sucking sound" of jobs going to Mexico has trade been so much on the minds of politicians and voters alike.

Why now, though? NAFTA first went into effect in 1994, and though it was criticized heavily by candidates like Perot before it passed, much of the noise surrounding it died down soon afterward.

Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch said in 2004 and 2000, voters saw little difference between Democrats John Kerry and Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush on the trade issue. So those voters — often white and working-class — voted based on what she calls "secondary" social issues.

This year, she predicts, the vast differences between Barack Obama and John McCain on the issue — McCain defends NAFTA and U.S. trade policy; Obama is critical — will mean voters will consider trade when they cast their ballots.

"It's really a clean, wedge issue," she said.

Brown said the 2006 election is part of the reason candidates now are paying so much attention to the issue. "I think Barack wins the state in part because of trade, pure and simple," he said.

Still, some in Ohio — including Brown's 2006 opponent, former Republican U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine — believe other pocketbook issues will play a bigger role than trade.

DeWine questions whether the trade issue cost him the 2006 election. "We lost for many reasons," he said, "but that was not a dominant issue at all."

According to DeWine, McCain will win Ohio by telling voters how to create new jobs and where those jobs will come from. He'll work to make Ohio a bigger exporter, DeWine said, and create new industries out of alternate sources of fuel.

"There are a great number of Ohio jobs every day that depend on trade," he said. "We have to sell overseas. We are a trading state....The economy is very important, but I don't think the Democrats are going to carry the state of Ohio by spending all of their time bashing NAFTA."