Joe Biden is running for Vice President and for a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware. In the Senate race, he's running way ahead of his Republican opposition, conservative commentator Christine O'Donnell. Polling results at Pollster.com suggest that O'Donnell will get less than a third of the vote.
Biden's overall trade record isn't very good (In this figure, from the Cato Institute, each axis shows the percent of votes against either trade barriers or trade subsidies. The higher an "X" is along the vertical axis the greater the opposition to subsidies, the further an "X" is to the right the greater the opposition to trade barriers. The votes are from the period 1997 to 2008.):
His record is even somewhat worse than it appears here. The figure averages all his votes since 1997 and he was more prone to vote against trade barriers in 1997 than he was in 2007:
The trend could reflect a couple of things - a response to changing attitudes toward trade in Delaware and/or a shift from supporting a President of his party (the first two Congresses met during the second Clinton Administration) to opposing a President of the other party. A shift like that could be for partisan reasons, or because of a change in the content of the trade legislation.
O'Donnell, a conservative, doesn't appear to have made trade an issue in this race. There's nothing about it on her web site.
At this point it's beginning to look like - barring something really unexpected - Obama/Biden will win the Presidential election. Neither Biden or O'Donnell will be in a Senator in January. That means its impossible to say whether this Senate seat will be more or less favorable to trade in the next Congress.
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