When a G.M. Plant Shut Down in Ohio

Hosted by Michael Barbaro and Natalie Kitroeff, produced by Michael Simon Johnson, with help from Alexandra Leigh Young, Adizah Eghan and Sindhu Gnanasambandan, and edited by Paige Cowett

General Motors idled a factory in Lordstown, and hundreds of autoworkers lost their jobs. Did their politics change?

So I saw this news, and I thought, huh, this is a major event politically, because this is a place that’s unusual. Trumbull County, that’s where Lordstown is located, it voted for Donald Trump by a really substantial margin. It was the first time the county had voted for a Republican since 1972. It had been this really true-blue union place, a real Democratic Party stronghold. So what does that mean? What does it mean that a place that went for Trump substantially, where Trump said specifically these manufacturing jobs are coming back, and on the very day after his election, they started going away? There’s got to be some political fallout from this. What is the consequence for Trump in this scenario? And I wanted to understand that. I wanted to go report on that. So that’s why I went to Lordstown, to talk to people like Brian Milo.

And at first, workers I talked to in Lordstown, they didn’t really understand the implications of that. But as the 1990s wore on, and then into the early 2000s, things actually started to change. Supply chains started springing up in Mexico. There was a lot of outsourcing that started to happen. Automation was happening as well. Technology was changing manufacturing. So many things were going on. And people started to notice that the jobs were disappearing. One worker I talked to, he started in the paint shop in the mid-1990s, and it started with 38 workers. And when he left the paint shop in the early 2000s, there were only four.

So the jobs are real multipliers. And by that I mean, it’s not just the G.M. job, it’s the suppliers, it’s the parts guys, it’s the window-makers, it’s the restaurant nearby that has waitresses and hostesses. So it has a really big effect when these things start happening. And what happens in large parts of northeast Ohio, and in Ohio more generally, there start to be social problems that come along with this economic decline. Men don’t have jobs, or the jobs they have are not paying enough to support a family. And there is this feeling of worthlessness. There’s an increase in drinking and drugs. The rise of single parenthood really soars. So you have really, in a lot of ways, the breakdown of the family that kind of follows, like a wave, this economic change.

Oh God, did the Democrats pay a price? So what ends up happening is these workers see that, at first don’t immediately understand it because it’s all kind of out of focus and confusing, but later realize, oh my God, that was our own party that basically gave away the farm. Why did they do that? There was this sense of betrayal among workers that actually, the Democrats — they weren’t that different than the Republicans. So from that point on, that union vote, it becomes a little less reliable for Democrats. And it’s not just Nafta, of course. Culturally, things are starting to shift, and the Democratic Party, it starts to feel alien to many blue-collar workers. And by the time 2008 comes around, it’s getting dicey. They end up going for Obama, but more because he was a change guy than because he was a Democrat. The autoworkers were happy. He bailed out G.M. But by the end of his second term, their lives hadn’t really gotten any better. So by 2016, their heads are basically in this place that’s — we’ll try anything. And for Trumbull County, that was Donald Trump.

I think for someone like Brian, the important thing is that these processes, these have been happening for a long time, and they’ve been wearing away at the community where he lives for a long time. So these things, they’re just much deeper than the most recent political slogan or the way that the Republicans or the Democrats are going to message this year. It’s about this sort of fundamental bedrock of our lives — it just has changed. You can’t just graduate from high school and go out and get a job and pay your rent. It’s not enough money. That feels like a real betrayal for people. It’s a set of unmet expectations that I think is causing real political change.

That’s right. But he’s also really skeptical, and he’s really sick of the political class in the United States. And he’s been burned by both sides at this point. He doesn’t trust any political leader to help him, and the consequence is a political system that’s still disconnected and pretty unaccountable to people like Brian. I think Brian’s going to vote. He’s patriotic, and he feels a sense of civic duty. But whether he puts any faith in the person he chooses, that’s another question. They’re going to have to work really hard to convince him that he should.

Source: The New York Times

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