At its peak, the Mahoning valley was once the beating heart of the US’s steel economy – a hardscrabble, heavily unionized Democratic bastion in north-eastern Ohio. But de-industrialization, sparked by the mass closure of steel mills in the late 1970s, transformed the region.
Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared. Populations declined. And support for Democrats slowly, but surely, faded. In 2020, Mahoning county voted for its first Republican presidential candidate – Donald Trump – in a generation.
This extraordinary political shift in Ohio – a one-time presidential battleground – catalyzed years of commentary and critique about how the state’s “working class” had abandoned the Democratic party. Then came the results on Tuesday night.
Ohio elected a Democratic senator, eight Democrats to the House of Representatives and the state’s first Democratic governor in 16 years.
But before any discussion of how Ohio’s “working class” has come home, historians and political scientists said such framing is too simple.
The idea that Democrats “lost” a monolithic block of voters in Ohio in the first place is a “false narrative”, according to Michael Pierce, a labor historian at the University of Arkansas. “A lot of commentators confuse the white working class with the working class.”
Republican gains in recent years came among the state’s rural white working class, through “a politics of grievance, of culture wars, of scare tactics”, Pierce said.
What does “working class” even mean? Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at the Ohio State University, is unsure. Blue-collar work, lacking a college degree and union membership are “almost completely unrelated categories”, he said.
Sorting by income does not help much either, he said. “A Nepali immigrant who works at a McDonald’s in Columbus is very different from a 60-year-old person in the middle of nowhere in rural Ohio,” Kogan said. “But they would both be lower income.”
On Tuesday, Democrats including Amy Acton, soon to be the state’s next governor, and Sherrod Brown, the populist who lost his Senate seat two years ago, and Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker who ran on a “workers first” platform, scored extraordinary victories as the party’s blue wave swept through Ohio.
Such results “suggest more of a latent solidarity within the Rust belt than we’ve talked about previously”, said Laura Bucci of St Joseph’s University.
The economic focus of Democratic campaigns “met the moment” for blue-collar voters frustrated with sustained affordability issues, said Bucci. “Everything has felt expensive and hard.”
“I am an independent. I vote by the issues,” Jim Conrad, a retired school teacher in Columbus, said earlier this week. “I’m tired of billionaires. The gap between the wealthiest and the poor in this country has gotten bigger each year.”