RALEIGH, N.C. -- Republicans will use the national stage to showcase the accomplishments of the last four years.
In an unusual move, during an unusual convention year, the party has decided to carry over its platform from four years ago. One of the big areas of interest then, and now, is foreign trade.
The platform says, “We need better negotiated trade agreements that put America first.”
Gordon Hunt and his family have a small business. His family has been creating lighting design for nearly three decades. He says they have seen the affects of shifting manufacturing overseas.
"We used to have price changes once a year and they were predictable,” says Hunt. “That wasn't the case anymore. And we were seeing price changes frequently and we were seeing them specifically - some products were impacted by those tariffs, some products were not impacted by those tariffs.”
“What the president has focused on is free and fair trade,” says Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican representing North Carolina.
Under the party platform, which Foxx helped write four years ago, it says the country needs “a winning trade policy,” and “international trade is crucial for all sectors of America’s economy. Massive trade deficits are not.”
In the last four years, about 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been added to the economy, NAFTA has been replaced with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and after a tariff standoff, there have been some structural changes to trade with China.
North Carolina economist Michael Walden says overall, the political maneuvers that went along with these changes didn't help folks in North Carolina, but trade with China was already hurting folks in our state.
“There has been a lot of analysis done that shows that counties in North Carolina, counties in other states, where you had industries like textiles and apparel, furniture, once China came into those markets, those counties were devastated in terms of their industry. And we're still living with that,” says Walden.
For Hunt, he says he believes things are definitely moving in the right direction.
“We would hear things about manufacturing, maybe a shuttered plant in Mississippi, for example, was not shuttered anymore or they were expanding the plant and they were bringing things back," Hunt adds.