Rust Belt voters on why they backed Trump again despite his broken promises
The last time Donald Trump was president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowd in 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones.”
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
Ordinarily, politicians who promise the moon and fail to deliver get punished at the ballot box. But that did not happen to Trump either. Instead, he has steadily built up his popularity in Youngstown, a city that was once a well-oiled Democratic party machine but has now turned into one of his most remarkable bases of working-class support.
“Does [Trump] understand at all what you’re going through?” Joe Biden asked Ohio voters during the 2020 presidential campaign, referring directly to the GM closure. “Does he see you where you are and where you want to be? Does he care?”
To which the answer, in Youngstown, has been an astonishing and vigorous “yes”.
Trump might have lost to Biden overall that year, but he became the first Republican presidential candidate in almost half a century to win in Youngstown and surrounding Mahoning County. This past November, he extended his margin there to a decisive 13 points, giving so much cover to local Republican party candidates that they won a majority of county-wide offices for the first time in 90 years.
Anyone seeking to understand the earthquake that has shaken US politics – to the point where a convicted felon, serial liar and twice-impeached former president can return to the White House in triumph, as Trump will do on 20 January – might learn a lot from the disillusioned working-class voters of northeast Ohio. [Continue reading…]