ONE OF THE MOST PAINFUL ASPECTS ... THEY GET HIT TWICE.

to get back here.”

It’s the same high-stakes gamble many small- and mid-size cities face. Children who left for college aren’t returning home as they once did. Many are choosing to live in metro areas or communities anchored by a major university, like Pittsburgh, 130 miles south of Erie.

In these larger cities, it’s easier for white-collar workers to quit their jobs to join employers that offer more money or opportunities for advancement. This trend has turned certain larger cities into magnets that draw employers and better-paid workers away from smaller cities.

“Size matters, and I think, this dynamic is accelerating,” can’t do well when you have a government that is so stupid, that is so incompetent.”

This argument helped win him Erie County, which had twice voted for Barack Obama. But in the 12 months since Trump’s election, Erie has shed about 800 jobs. The number of people seeking jobs declined by more than 2,000. Trump has announced taxes on steel and aluminum imports in hopes of bolstering U.S. industry.

Community leaders in Erie note that manufacturing remains a strength for northwest Pennsylvania. But it seems impossible to restore a long-gone era of prosperity that was built on factory work.

Erie’s General Electric locomotive plant peaked with roughly 20,000 workers just after the Second World War, when whirling assembly lines had helped to secure an Allied victory and an economic boom that followed helped propel growth. Hammermill Paper relied on trucks stacked with logs that rumbled through downtown to its paper mill. Lord Corp. made industrial coatings. Zurn made plumbing equipment.

But as the market for locomotives declined, the GE plant steadily downsized. It will soon have a head count closer to 3,000. Hammermill was bought by International Paper in 1986. Its jobs went to Memphis.

Lord recently replaced its old plant in Erie with a new factory nearby, but its headquarters remains in North Carolina. Zurn decided in 2015 to move its base to Milwaukee because it saw Wisconsin as a hub for “global water industry leaders.”

Many of the factory buildings are decades old, too dilapidated and mazelike to efficiently run an assembly line that needs wide-open spaces. Some long-standing factory workers in Erie earn a healthy $35 an hour. But that’s more than many companies are now willing to pay for factory work, thereby limiting how much manufacturing can fuel prosperity in cities like Erie.

Bob Glowacki, who heads a real estate management company and once served on Erie’s city council, said the city must look beyond manufacturing.

“It’s fine that Donald Trump says he’s going to get all the companies that moved to China to come back to the United States,” he said. “But if that happened, you’re only going to get 20 per cent of those jobs back. Technology has replaced them. How do you change that in Erie?”