Follow me here on a bit of a twisting tale which leads to the following conclusion, albeit, arguable: if the Democrats don’t take back the House and say miss by a seat or two, they can blame themselves for not holding the line against so-called “free trade.” Here’s how I see it.

In today’s New York Times, there is a piece entitled, “In Old Textile District, the Free-Trade Issue Dominates.” The piece profiles the race between Republican incumbent Robin Hayes and Democratic challenger Larry Kissell:

It has been three years since the old brick textile mill here shut down, throwing 4,800 people out of work. Yet the mill, which once made pillowcases and closed in part because of competition from imports, casts a shadow over the heated race for Congress in this once booming industrial enclave of North Carolina.

As if by chance, though probably not, both candidates are linked to the old mill. Charles Cannon, legendary founder of the Cannon textile empire and grandfather of Representative Robin Hayes, the Republican incumbent, built it in the 1920’s, and Mr. Hayes worked summers there as a youth.

Larry Kissell, his Democratic opponent, worked there for 27 years before becoming a high school teacher in 2001, when, he says, he saw “the handwriting on the wall” about its future. Now his campaign is organized around the threat of foreign competition and Mr. Hayes’s tiebreaking vote last year for a trade accord with Central America.

“The No. 1 issue voters care about this year is jobs,” Mr. Kissell said Monday as he campaigned door to door in a neighborhood near the rubble-strewn field where the Kannapolis mill once stood. “We have lost 10,000 jobs in the textile industry here in the last several years. Free trade has not been good for this district.”

By most accounts, Mr. Kissell has an uphill battle in trying to unseat Mr. Hayes, who has withstood challenges on the trade issue in the past. In 2001, he was put on the defensive for casting another tiebreaking vote for a trade measure, after a last-minute reversal accompanied by his weeping on the House floor.

But Mr. Kissell is one of a dozen Democratic candidates for the House, and a few for the Senate, who are making at least some headway in tapping voter anxiety about trade.

That’s all fine and good. But, what the reporter fails to do in this piece is describe how Hayes got a pass during the more recent vote on the Oman Free Trade Agreement (OFTA). Here’s how our friends from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch described the situation, comparing the vote on OFTA to the vote on CAFTA. :

Yet, remarkably, 11 Democrats who opposed CAFTA flipped to support OFTA. Interestingly, most of these representatives stood by the sidelines as the vote clock ran out and only voted “yea” after the nearly party-line GOP vote in favor of OFTA – with 13 GOP CAFTA opponents flipping to support OFTA – put the agreement over the top. The Democrats’ votes in favor of the agreement allowed 13 GOP such as, Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), Charlie Taylor (R-N.C.)1 and Robin Hayes (R-N.C.), who had been forced by their leadership to walk the plank to provide CAFTA’s one-vote margin – many now facing serious CAFTA-backlash in their election bids – to vote “no” on the less important OFTA.

By letting 22 Democrats vote “yes” on OFTA, the Democratic leadership let Hayes get a pass and vote “no” on OFTA. Forcing these Republicans to vote “yes” on OFTA would have given Democratic challengers another club to hammer the Republican incumbents–and Gerlach and Fitzpatrick are also in very tight races. You may say that’s a small thing but, in very close races, that could matter a whole lot, particularly in terms of intensity from union voters who may be on the fence.