After Michigan Loss, Hillary Clinton Sharpens Message on Jobs and Trade

From the start of her presidential campaign 11 months ago, Hillary Clinton has presented an upbeat assessment of an improving economy, saying Wall Street and corporations would be held accountable, but must be part of the solution for all Americans to benefit from the country’s prosperity.

“I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful,” she often said.

Her message has at times collided with an angry electorate drawn to the populist pitch of Senator Bernie Sanders. In Michigan on Tuesday, it crashed.

The state’s voters, scarred by the free trade deals associated with Mrs. Clinton and her husband that have been widely blamed for the loss of American manufacturing jobs, delivered a surprise victory to Mr. Sanders, who railed here against “disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America.”

While his victory did little to bridge the delegate gap with Mrs. Clinton, the loss in Michigan left the Clinton camp confronting an urgent quandary as the Democratic contest moves to other Midwestern states like Ohio.

“Hillary Clinton has supported virtually every one of these trade agreements,” Mr. Sanders said in the interview, conducted Wednesday at a hotel in Miami. “Our message is resonating increasingly with the American people and especially working people and young people who understand — and we saw this in Michigan yesterday.”

Kristina Schake, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Clinton, told MSNBC that the Sanders campaign had “really mischaracterized” her record on trade “in the lead-up to Michigan, and she is ready to get in there and set the record straight.”

The Clinton campaign says that going forward, it will continue to run its own advertisements highlighting how Mrs. Clinton has called out specific bad corporate actors by name, an effort to combat Mr. Sanders’s line of attack. Trade deals alone could be more difficult to disavow.

“Nafta was her husband’s achievement, and it is hard to claim implied credit for his economic successes and claim opposition to one of the cornerstones of his policy,” said David Axelrod, the former senior strategist for Mr. Obama. “She can claim the TPP was an Obama initiative, but walking away from him too overtly runs counter to her strategy.”

In the early contests, Mrs. Clinton did not have to contend as directly with her record on global trade deals, but when the race reached the Midwest, the issue became acute, with her past positioning coming back to haunt her. In a 2012 speech in Australia, Mrs. Clinton said the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal “sets the gold standard in trade agreements,” but in October said she could not support the deal.

And for years, she has called to renegotiate Nafta to make it more favorable to workers in the United States. Former aides to Mr. Clinton said she opposed the pact in 1993, but could not speak out against it as first lady.

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