Twelve years ago, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, took the stage at his party in Columbus to celebrate winning a second term. Barack Obama just moved Ohio for the second time, after emphasizing that his administration saved the auto industry. Brown wanted to announce this success on stage, but he was losing his voice, so his wife, the writer Connie Schultz, took his place.
When she reached Jeep, which is expanding into Toledo, and General Motors, which builds the Chevy Cruze at its revamped plant near Youngstown, Brown began inserting husky words to make sure she got the details right. “The aluminum is made in Cleveland … the transmission is made in Toledo … the engine is made in Defiance … the airbag is made in Braunschweig.”
I’ve been thinking about this point a lot on the Ohio campaign trail this month. Brown is running for re-election again. But the political landscape has changed a lot. Ohio is no longer a presidential battleground. GM no longer makes the Cruze — the Lordstown plant where it was assembled closed in 2019. And Brown, who has won the last two races by 5 and 7 points, is in a tight battle with a car dealership magnate named Bernie Moreno.
Brown and a shrinking group of Democrats in Ohio still stand for a certain type of Democratic Party — one that cares about the working class, that invests in its cities and factories and values the manufacturing jobs that feed the nation. This matter should have become easier lately. Over the past four years, the Biden administration has championed massive investments in renewable energy and computer chip manufacturing; two new Intel factories are under construction near Columbus. Still, the political landscape for Brown and Ohio’s last Democrats is tougher than ever.
There are several possible explanations. Sixty percent of Ohioans have only a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, or a few years of college — a relatively high percentage. Union membership is down from its peak in 1989. And it took time for Biden’s investment to grow.
At Brown’s rally outside the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall in Dayton, local building council president David Cox told me his members are getting more work than they’ve seen in 35 years. So why, I asked, didn’t this restore support for Democrats among workers? “These guys are going to take a while to wake up,” Cox said.
But Democrats often overlook another dynamic, and that’s the role of place: Even if your own finances are safe, when you look out the window and see your city or town struggling, you also believe you’re in trouble. Some scientists have called it the feeling of “common fate,” and that could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small towns in the industrial Midwest — like Reading and Erie in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Battle Creek in Michigan, Oshkosh and Racine in Wisconsin — where Brown and other Democrats are fighting. to hold their own and where Kamala Harris should do well (or at least hold her own).
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In 2007, academic Laureen Hoyt and urban planning consultant Andre Leroux compiled a nationwide list of “forgotten cities,” which were old and small with a population of 15,000 to 150,000 people and a median household income of less than $35,000. Recently, urban researcher Michael Bloomberg updated it. Of the 179 cities on the list, 37 are in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Ohio is the leader with 23 cities.
Pundits often overlook such places (they tend to focus on the big blue cities, the deep red rural areas, and the suburbs in between), but given how clustered these smaller cities are in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they’ll have of great importance in the battle for both the White House and control of Congress. Recently, two Ohio towns have gained particular prominence: Middletown (population 50,000) as the hometown of J. D. Vance and Springfield (about 60,000 people) as home to a large community of Haitian immigrants, whom both Vance and Donald Trump have targeted in their rhetoric.
I have visited dozens of these cities. They often have beautiful downtowns with grand central plazas and ornate century-old bank buildings that rise 10 or 12 stories, but it can be hard to find a cup of coffee after 2pm or a place to watch a ball game on TV at night. The local news is full of articles I found a few weeks ago in a newspaper in Lima, Ohio (pop. 35,000): a report that a 12th dollar store is opening in the area and a letter to the editor lamenting the closing a Dana Incorporated auto parts plant with 280 jobs. Equally disturbing is the fact that young people are becoming increasingly difficult to find; more are drawn to booming big cities like Columbus, which vacuum up aspirants from across the state.
For decades, these smaller cities have leaned Democratic, but in the last decade they have become more red. In 2012, Obama won Green Bay, Wisconsin, nearly twice as much as Joe Biden in 2020; Obama won Saginaw by 15 percentage points. Even in Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Obama’s lead was more than 4,000 votes.
What confused liberals about this shift was that many people who left the Democratic Party felt good about themselves; these cities are full of small business owners, factory workers, and retirees with pensions living under a Democrat president. But seeing your small town turn into a shadow of its former self can expose you to a hard-hitting populist message, even if you’re in charge yourself. Here’s what scientists mean by “common fate,” and that’s what’s missing when we analyze voting behavior by income, education, or race alone.
Representative Marcy Kaptur—an Ohio Democrat who is an urban planner by training and, after more than 40 years in office, the longest-serving woman in Congress—understands this stark reality. Her mother was a union organizer at a spark plug factory, and she watched these sweeping changes unfold from Toledo to the smaller towns she represented, such as Sandusky and Lorain.
It’s rare to hear her talk about the social issues that often dominate debate on the left. Instead, she’s most pressing whether the nation’s industrial base can support its military, whether small towns have a track record of economic development, or whether workers at a shuttered Toledo power plant can find new jobs. “I don’t think the economy is destiny, but it’s 85%,” she told me this month during a visit to the new steel mill at Cleveland Cliffs in Toledo.
For years, she has fought to get Democratic leaders to care about left-behind districts like hers. In 2018, Hillary Clinton boasted that the districts it suffered losses in 2016 produced two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product, as if votes from economically prosperous districts counted more. Two years earlier, Chuck Schumer, now the Senate Majority Leader, declared: “For every Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll gain two moderate Republicans in suburban Philadelphia. And you can replicate that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
That logic baffles Kaptur, who is currently locked in a bitter battle with state lawmaker Derek Merin. “A country cannot survive if broad sections of your population cannot move forward,” she told me. Last year, to show party leaders how much Democrats are losing ground in districts like hers, her office produced a chart that ranked the 435 House districts by median income. The moral: Democrats now represent most of the higher-income areas—in places like the Bay Area, the Northeast, and metro Washington—while Republicans dominate many of the lower-income areas. Her district was ranked 341st, surrounded by red. “Washington has a problem with us,” she said. “They need binoculars.”
For Brown, the plight of these small towns is personal because he is from the archetypal town: Mansfield (pop. 48,000), which has lost a number of manufacturers. This month, the first person I met upon entering its central square was a woman asking for money. Brown’s father was a doctor, but, as Brown often reminds voters, he went to school with the children of factory workers, which made him, like Kaptur, against trade deals like NAFTA, which many other Democrats supported.
“Politicians of both parties have done the bidding of rich corporations and sold out the country over and over and over again,” he said at a United Auto Workers hall in Toledo this month.
After the event, I asked him about the challenges facing small towns. “These cities have suffered even more than metropolitan areas because young people have often left because of a lack of economic opportunities,” he said. “That’s why I pay special attention to them.”
On the campaign trail, that means more visits to smaller towns than most other Democrats. These cities also figure prominently in Brown’s rhetoric. “I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a town that’s a lot like Springfield, a lot like Zanesville, a lot like Hamilton or Middletown,” Brown began his speech outside a union hall in Dayton, a city also on the updated list. “forgotten”. After that event, he engaged in a long conversation with a new kind of small-town leader: one of the pioneers of the Haitian community in Springfield, who now owns five houses there and came to Dayton to see Brown perform.
No doubt Brown and Kaptur’s understanding of such places helped them survive as long as they did when the state went red. It’s not like their opponents have offered these small towns lots of concrete solutions of their own. Far from it: Moreno’s ads focus on his support for Trump, and virtually all of the tens of millions of dollars in attack ads placed against Brown by outside groups emphasis on transsexuals youth
There is a painful irony in this to Democrats like Brown and Kaptur. For years, they have urged their party to pay more attention to these scattered outposts of their base: Mansfield and Middletown, Springfield and Sandusky, across their state and region. They have been largely vindicated in their warnings about trade policy and the political fallout, and over the past few years, a national Democratic response has finally emerged.
But in many places, demoralization has already spread so far, and local institutions have so decayed, that an oppositional message based on nationwide appeals against the culture war has become much easier to register. Now Brown is as vulnerable as ever – is only 4 points ahead of Harris in the latest poll — and the Kaptur race is just as competitive. This is doubly painful for them because over the years they have largely sidestepped the culture war front, focusing instead on economic issues.
Brown and Kaptur may well survive the final tests. But it’s hard to see how Democrats will rebuild their standing in Ohio — or improve their prospects in nearby states that remain more accessible, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania — without helping revive those small towns as well. As Kaptur simply told me, sitting in her Toledo office overlooking the Maumee River, “They have to be seen.”
