Roughly 1,600 workers on the Chevy Cruze assembly line at the Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant will soon find themselves out of a job as General Motors Co. abandons weak-selling sedans like the one manufactured in northeast Ohio — the latest blow to a region that has weathered many.
The closure may not bode much better for President Trump, who last year stood in front of supporters in Youngstown, 20 minutes from the Lordstown plant, and promised humming factories and rising home values, reinforcing the pledges he made months earlier in his bid for the presidency.
What some political observers view as a setback for Mr. Trump and his populist brand could be an opening for Democrats to regain lost ground as the party of the working class — a shift in political identity that has eroded Democratic support in places like the Mahoning Valley, where the party will have to rebrand if it wants a shot at the White House in 2020.
“There’s a golden opportunity for the Democratic Party to reinvent itself before 2020 and show that it’s still the party of the working class,” said David B. Cohen, assistant director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “Donald Trump’s biggest strength of 2016 was being able to show himself as a champion of the working person. Had he not been successful in doing that he would not be president right now.”
Mr. Trump’s eight percentage point victory in Ohio came from strong support in the state’s rural counties, the reddening of once-Democratic suburbs, and political realignments in other areas, including northeast Ohio. Around Youngstown, Mr. Trump carried Trumbull County, home of the Lordstown complex, by six percentage points after President Barack Obama won re-election there by 23 percentage points. Mr. Trump didn’t win neighboring Mahoning County, but Democrat Hillary Clinton was only able to carry it by three percentage points.
In Ohio, at least, there were echoes of Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory in the midterm election. Republicans swept statewide elected offices except for the U.S Senate. Incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown — who is mulling a White House run — was the lone Democrat standing by a seven-point margin. The results yielded so little ground to Democrats that it led many to consider whether Ohio may no longer be a national bellwether and presidential battleground.
It didn’t take long, though, for the GOP midterm victory in Ohio to be overshadowed by GM’s plan to idle five North American factories and lay off at least 14,000 workers. At Lordstown, the move followed the elimination of two shifts and some 3,000 jobs since 2016.
The reality of a shuttered Lordstown plant may affect how once-Democratic voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2016 vote in 2020, Mr. Cohen said.
“What you’re seeing now is a lot of those voters who decided to switch parties in 2016 are starting to become very disenchanted with the Trump presidency. I think they’re seeing behind the curtain and realizing that Oz is just the guy with the microphone and keyboard. The question is, are Democrats going to be able to take advantage now that these voters are realizing his promises may not be kept?” he said.
Tom Zawistowski, executive director of the Portage County Tea Party and president of the We the People Convention, the closest thing Ohio has to an umbrella tea party organization, said Mr. Trump will still come out ahead if he sticks to his word on trade.
“When Trump talked about bringing manufacturing back, he was also saying no to just moving jobs overseas and bringing product back here without penalties,” he said. “That’s what really resonated with people. If you’re going to close plants in the U.S. and keep them in Mexico, then there’s going to be a 25 percent tariff on cars you wanted to import.
“If he does this, then they will feel he’s protecting America’s interests,” he said. “If he doesn’t, then they’ll feel they can get away with it just as he said they did with NAFTA.”
In a tweet, Mr. Trump laid the blame for Lordstown on GM and its CEO, Mary Barra, and said he’s thinking about getting rid of what he called the corporation’s electric car subsidies. “The U.S. saved General Motors, and this is the THANKS we get!” the President wrote.
The Ohio Republican Party’s Jane Timken, whom Mr. Trump backed as chairman after his election, said the President is unhappy with the Lordstown closure.
“He’s looking at options,” she said. “[GOP Gov.-elect] Mike DeWine and [Republican] Sen. [Rob] Portman also are working with GM to come up with a solution. I think at the end of the day, with all three of them working with GM, they want to protect those jobs, and I believe that we’ll likely have a successful outcome.”
To win back the Mahoning Valley, experts say Democrats would have to overcome the erosion of their base over the past several decades, especially among white Americans without college degrees who make up much of the labor vote.
“I believe [Democrats] have taken labor for granted a little,” said Dennis Earl, president of United Auto Workers Local 14, the union representing workers at GM’s Toledo Transmission Plant, which was spared the automaker’s latest round of layoffs. “Democrats haven’t really been attentive to the working class. ... I still believe they’re more aligned with what we want in the middle class, but they’ve gotten away from that and it’s been really easy for Republicans to peel people off.”
“Trump did siphon some support,” he continued. “He’s saying the right things — ‘I’m going to be tough on Mary Barra’ — but his words don’t match his actions.”
While labor unions are known to mainly back Democrats — Local 14 endorsed Democrats up and down the ticket in Ohio’s midterm — Mr. Earl said he will put its weight behind any candidate, Republican or Democrat, who supports laborers. And in Toledo that’s crucial.
“You have to be a big labor supporter to win Toledo,” he said.
Whereas Lucas County remains a Democratic stronghold, the gutting of the iron and steel industries in northeast Ohio made it ripe for Republicans in 2016.
“The workers in Youngstown, their big steel companies just disappeared,” said Toledo Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the Democrat whose district snakes along Lake Erie from Toledo to Cuyahoga County. “One of the reasons the Trump ticket broke even in Lorain County is because Republic [Steel] and U.S. Steel there were promised the steel industry would recover. They wanted to believe that this administration would make a difference in their lives. They had been dealt so many bad hands that it was like grasping at the golden ring, and now their hands have been slapped even harder.”
Political observers believe a Democratic contender for 2020 will need to appeal to the industrial Midwest — and Mr. Brown, pro-labor and boosted by his midterm victory, is hearing the call. As he continues to think about a presidential bid, Mr. Brown reported speaking with Mr. Trump about the GM closures. A day earlier he tweeted to the President: “I’ll compare my record standing up for Ohio & American workers to yours any day.”
“If he runs for President, he’ll be talking about Lordstown ... he’ll be talking about Toledo and what’s next for northwest Ohio,” Mr. Cohen said. “Sherrod Brown and [Youngstown-area Rep.] Tim Ryan have been talking about these issues for years, but national Democrats haven’t been as concerned about the plight of the working class as much as Democrats from Midwestern states and manufacturing areas.”
Appearing with fellow members of the House Automotive Caucus, Mr. Ryan — who along with Mr. Brown are among two dozen potential 2020 presidential candidates in the Democratic field — blasted tax policy benefiting GM and the wealthy over middle class Americans, saying, “We need to reset our economic policy in the United States and put our workers right in the center and then build the economy around that.”
At the same news conference, Miss Kaptur said the President was propelled to the White House from auto-making states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio, where he campaigned on promises made to disenchanted workers. “What we have now is the reverse of those promises impacting tens of thousands of people across our country,” she said.
Responding to the Lordstown closure, Miss Kaptur told The Blade: “You talk about a cannon ball across the bow. This is it.”
Columbus Bureau Chief Jim Provance contributed to this report.
First Published December 3, 2018, 11:30 a.m.
