Great expectations
Rust Belt optimistic and anxious over Trump victory
Washington — Only about 20 miles separate Randall Shelton and Cecile Taylor’s homes in Wayne County, Mich. It’s the gulf between their expectations for Donald Trump’s presidency that seems unbridgeable.
Shelton, 63, a disabled auto worker living in Allen Park, hopes Trump — an “angry white man” like him, he says — will create jobs and crack down on illegal immigration. Too much is given to people “who haven’t paid into the American pie,” he said.
Taylor, a college administrator from Canton, despairs over Trump’s election. She worries about what he’ll mean to race relations, to minority rights, to America’s place in the world.
“I’m desperately trying to find some light at the end of a tunnel we haven’t even started down,” said Taylor, 52. “I’ve never been more anxious in my life.”
Trump takes the oath of office Friday. He lost the popular ballot by nearly 3 million votes but still won because of a near-sweep in the industrial Rust Belt.
The key was flipping three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — by a total of less than 80,000 votes, a razorthin margin equivalent to about six-tenths of a percent of the nearly 14 million votes cast in those states.
But Trump’s victory wasn’t just about them: It was about Ohio and Iowa, which both had twice backed Barack Obama. It was about Indiana, which supported Obama in 2008 but now looks out of reach for Democrats. And it was about Kentucky, where Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, won twice but which rejected her by 30 percentage points.
In Trump, said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., voters — especially white working-class ones — heard an economic and cultural clarion call: Their losses could be reversed. Trade deals could be torn up. Coal could be big again. Manufacturing could return.
“These are people whose lives have been transformed over the last couple of decades, hitting them in their families and where they live. They don’t have the skills, they can’t pick up and go,” Madonna said. “These are people who had no expectation that their lives could be better until Trump.”
They’re voters like 26year-old Ryan Wylie of Detroit, who is unemployed and supported the Republican despite the grief he says friends gave him in a city where Trump lost 95% of the vote to Hillary Clinton. He sees Trump as a strong leader who will start “bringing jobs back and just taking care of business.”
In Luzerne County, Pa., Democratic county council member Eileen Sorokas — who volunteered for Obama and voted for him twice — backed Trump and is confident he’ll be a great president.
“He’ll handle himself pretty good,” said Sorokas, 69, who lives in a county where coalmining jobs are gone and once-booming factories have long been shuttered. “I watched him on ‘The Apprentice.’ … I think he’s a businessman and he’s going to do a good job.”
Deep-seated worries
For others living in this part of America, a Trump presidency generates angst, even fear.
Sorn Sanh, a 38-yearold Republican bank manager in York County, Pa., voted for Clinton. A single mother of Cambodian heritage, Sanh’s teenage daughter helped organize a unity rally after students were seen at a neighboring vocational school carrying a Trump sign and chanting “white power.”
“I think we are going backwards,” she said, noting she believes “the whole reason they thought they could do that” was because of Trump’s campaign rhetoric comparing Mexicans to rapists, criticizing Muslims as not doing enough to protect America and suggesting a ban on Muslims entering the country. “You talk about bullying, this is bullying,” she said.
At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, in the heart of the one the largest Arab-American communities in the United States, student body president Syeda Arbab, 21, whose family is Bangladeshi, said she’s already had one classmate who wears a hijab say someone on campus asked where her “badge” was to indicate she’s a Muslim.
“It’s going to be exhausting,” she predicted of the coming fight to protect rights.
He’ll ‘do great things’
Perhaps no message tapped into the heartland quite like Trump’s slogan to “Make America Great Again.”
The job losses here are staggering: In the seven Rust Belt states examined by the USA Today Network, more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000. Nationally, it’s some 7 million manufacturing jobs since 1980.
And while unemployment is down steeply in the aftermath of the last recession and some manufacturing gains have been seen, wages have declined or stayed flat in current dollars.
It’s a situation Trump’s supporters believe he will change.
In Macomb County, Mich. — which Trump won by nearly 12 percentage points after Obama won it by four in 2012 — St. Clair Shores plumber John Scalzo, 52, predicted that by securing the borders and lowering taxes, reducing government and getting rid of programs he believes stifle initiative, Trump’s “going to do great things.”
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Let’s create a climate here in America where it’s more profitable for (business) to stay here than go overseas. We finally have someone who’s going to do that. Look at what he’s done already,” he added, noting Carrier’s decision not to move 1,000 jobs to Mexico and Ford Motor’s decision to reverse course on a $1.6 billion investment in Mexico following his election.
It’s not just workingclass voters who see better days ahead.
In Troy, Mich., Jeffrey Scott, president of Allan Tool and Machine, said anything that spurs construction — like the lower tax rates proposed by Trump — will be a boost for his business.
Lori Schaefer-Weaton, 49, president of Agri-Industrial Plastics in Fairfield, Iowa, likes a lot of what the president-elect says. But she has concerns that Trump — who has baited world leaders and threatened debilitating tariffs — needs to be consistent.
“There are a lot of things that when he speaks you feel like he is speaking because he knows what he is talking about,” Schaefer-Weaton said.
Having said that, she added: “I don’t want to pick fights. I need to know what my rules are for the next five years … not to the next tweet.”
There is also a strong undercurrent of hope among Trump voters for returning to a less culturally and ethnically diverse time. Many believe immigrants take jobs from citizens.
In western Wisconsin, which swung toward Trump after backing Obama in the last two elections, Richard Zastrow, a 54-year old truck driver and part-time farmer in Arcadia, said Trump got his vote not just for promising to keep automakers from building cars in Mexico. It’s his belief that Trump will be tougher on immigration, too. In 2000, 74 Hispanics lived in Arcadia. Today, it is home to nearly 1,000.
“We didn’t want all these people coming into the country,” said Zastrow, taking a break from tending his 100-odd head of beef cattle, before heading off to his night job hauling chickens. “We’ve got to be able to track them, know what’s here. We can’t just turn them loose. They’re just coming like flies.”
In Aspers, in southcentral Pennsylvania, Jose Beltran is a 49-yearold farm crew supervisor and former migrant worker from Mexico who is employed in the U.S. year-round now on a work visa. He doesn’t have any fears of a Trump administration, or his talk of walls or anything else.
Standing in 19-degree weather on a windswept hill, as he and a crew trimmed fruit trees, he asked, “Did you see any white guys on the way up? Who wants to do the job I do, working in winter?”
Obamacare effect
One likely outcome of the Trump presidency is clear: the end of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
Joseph Bryant, a 38year-old tax adviser in affluent Fishers, Ind., north of Indianapolis, won’t miss it.
A married, gay libertarian who adopted his two children after their mother was murdered, Bryant said the ACA has been a nightmare. He can’t find therapists for his children, and since he began buying insurance through the exchange in 2014, his premiums have risen from $3,000 a year to $8,400 — even as his out of pocket expenses climbed to $7,000 last year.
He has little hope for Trump as president, but at least with a Republican in office, he says he believes the ACA can be replaced.
In tiny Montmorency County, Mich., county commissioner Albert LaFleche, 83, sees Obamacare far differently. A Democrat who voted for Clinton, he saw his county give nearly 70% of its vote to Trump, even though the ACA has cut the uninsured rate there from 24% to 8% — one of the largest declines in the state.
His adult daughter has several cancers and has insurance thanks to the ACA.
“Everybody thinks they’re paying too much for it, but without it, my daughter — I don’t know where she’d be,” he said.
Some in the Rust Belt wonder what Trump’s election means next: Will it reinvigorate Democrats stunned by his victory? Or is the region on a path — like West Virginia, Kentucky and now, it appears, possibly Indiana — to becoming a GOP stronghold?
“Democrats generally missed the boat in understanding just how deep the dissatisfaction of working class, largely white, voters was,” said Tim Burke, Democratic Party chairman in Ohio’s Hamilton County. “You look around the entire Midwest at the sweep by Trump and it was, in the end, the loss of the white middle class.” The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Chrissie Thompson, Jason Williams, Dan Horn, Jeremy Fugleberg and Mark Wert; the Des Moines Register’s Mike Kilen and Jason Noble; the Indianapolis Star’s Alvie Lindsay and Chris Sikich; the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Joseph Gerth and Morgan Watkins; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert and Rick Romell; the York (Pa.) Daily Record’s Rick Lee and Randy Parker; and USA TODAY’s Adrian Burns and Deirdre Shesgreen contributed to this report.