Trump keeps grip on Youngstown area
YOUNGSTOWN — In May 2016, the Mahoning County chairman of the Democratic Party sent a memo warning Hillary Clinton’s campaign that it was on the verge of losing Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan because she was not connecting with blue-collar voters.
These states “should be easy wins for us,” David Betras wrote.
He said he got no answer. As he sees it now, Democrats are still just as out of touch.
Betras, who recently left his party post, said that while Democrats in Washington harp on President Donald Trump’s unfitness for office, his taxes and possible impeachment, the president is solidifying blue-collar support through an aggressive trade war with China even if his tariffs mean economic pain in the short term.
“The Democratic Party has lost its voice to speak to people that shower after work and not before work,” Betras said. “All we’re saying is he won’t turn over his tax returns. He’s saying, ‘I’m fighting China to get you better jobs.’”
He added of blue-collar voters: “They don’t care about his taxes — they just don’t.”
In the 10th year of a national economic recovery that has brought record low unemployment and rising wages to many parts of the country, northeastern Ohio is still among the walking wounded, the result of decades of de-industrialization driven by free trade deals. The loss of 1,600 jobs at a General Motors plant in Lordstown in March, despite Trump’s visible efforts to save them, was the latest blow.
But even though stresses on families and communities are already acute, Trump appears to have lost little of his blue-collar support here. It is a sign of how tight a bond he has with voters who were once staunch Democrats, in an allegiance as much cultural as economic. But it also undermines the argument of the Democrats’ leading 2020 candidate, Joe Biden, that he would be the best nominee to win back Midwestern states because of his own appeal to working-class voters.
On the campaign trail, Biden has downplayed China’s global economic threat. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!” he exclaimed at a rally in Iowa, adding, “They’re not competition for us.”
Democrats in Youngstown said that is exactly the wrong message.
The president is “punching China in the face” with tariffs, while the “leading candidate on our side is saying China is not even an issue,” said Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat whose district includes Youngstown and who is himself a presidential candidate. “If we go into the election with that as our message, we’ll get beat again.”
The Biden campaign declined to respond. In New Hampshire last week, Biden said enlisting U.S. allies in a joint effort is a better approach than Trump’s goit-alone trade war, which Biden said hurts working people and farmers.
Ryan, who is not well known outside Ohio, criticized Trump for lacking a plan to rebuild U.S. industry. But he agreed with the president that China is the No. 1 threat and that a new type of Cold War over trade might be looming.
Whatever benefits decades of globalization brought to some parts of the country, there was no effort to reinvest in regions such as northeastern Ohio, where steel mills once lined 22 miles of the Mahoning River. The region has bled tens of thousands of jobs.
“The communities were cut loose and ignored, and then they voted for Trump because at least he’s punching somebody in the face, and no one else is,” Ryan said.
One of those voters is Darrell Franks, a retired tool-and-die maker who was once a Democrat but now votes Republican.
“What I want from a president is the rest of the world to look at him and go, ‘Don’t mess with that guy, he will get even,’” Franks said one morning in the Yankee Kitchen restaurant in Trumbull County’s Vienna Township just north of Youngstown. “I don’t want kinder, gentler. I don’t want some female that wants her agenda.”
Blue-collar voters who had not voted Republican for president since 1972 flipped Trumbull County for Trump by 30 percentage points in 2016.
The Brookings Institution reported this month that in counties that voted for Trump — most of them rural or exurban — new jobs have been added at a faster pace than in counties that voted for Clinton, although Clinton counties represent the bulk of the nation’s economy.
The president’s re-election campaign is marshaling such economic news to solidify his base of white working-class voters. Democrats are on the defensive, parsing economic data to argue that many people have jobs, but some must juggle two to make ends meet.
Although Democrats made gains in the midterm elections in many places around the country that Trump had carried, the Mahoning Valley was an exception. The only two seats in the Ohio General Assembly that flipped from blue to red were in the region.
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat with working-class appeal, won re-election by a bigger margin than in his 2012 race, but his support slipped in Mahoning County and other counties on the Pennsylvania line.
Matt Borges, a former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, said a fundamental demographic realignment has taken place under Trump.
“We’ve traded off suburban Republicans who may never find their way back to the party for that white working-class traditional Democratic voter, who has been more and more alienated from their party’s rhetoric,” he said. “Is this a long-term gain for Republicans here? Yes.”
About 40% of the union autoworkers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown voted for Trump, which was twice the support for Republican presidential candidates in the past, said Tim O’hara, vice president of United Auto Workers Local 1112, which represents the factory.
He said few are abandoning the president, even after the plant, which made the Chevy Cruze, laid off thousands of workers in three waves after Trump’s election.
O’hara advised Democratic presidential candidates not to waste breath trying to win back union voters who supported Trump.
“I don’t think those Trump people are going to flip back, even if it’s Joe Biden, who has a lot of support in this area,” he said. “I think they’re dug in on Trump. Whatever happens, they’re going to go down with the ship with him.”
Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Democrats have not yet lost the economic argument, and in places such as Macomb County, Michigan, and western Wisconsin, white voters without a college degree swung back to the Democrats in 2018 after embracing Trump in 2016.
Greenberg has shown focus groups of unregistered voters tweets by Trump boasting that the economy was booming.
“It was like a get-out-thevote thing for Democrats,” he said. “People have had so little income gain for so long and are so on the edge that they will not give credit to political leaders, and Trump will find that to be true in 2020.”
In a region such as northeastern Ohio, it is difficult to untangle the president’s appeal on economics from his tapping of resentment toward demographic and cultural change.
Customers at the Yankee Kitchen tended to echo Trump’s depiction of an emergency on the Mexican border.
In a county that is 89% white and less than 2% Hispanic, they spoke of immigrants in the country illegally bankrupting Sun Belt hospitals, dragging down wages and burdening taxpayers.
Amy Giovannone, 51, an oil and gas consultant and an Army veteran, said, “Here’s my thing: I cannot deal with the sympathy for illegal immigrants. My grandparents both came over from Italy. They worked for their citizenship. They were poor, they had to farm, they did everything right.”
Tom Mauerman, 54, a foreman at an aluminum extrusion plant, said: “People pouring over the border is unacceptable. We’re funding everybody on the planet. I’m tired of it.”
He added, “If Trump plays his cards right, that’s his ticket to win the White House again.”