YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — In July 2017, just six months after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he received a hero’s welcome for the ages in this post-industrial town. The streets took on a festival atmosphere as supporters, almost all dressed in some combination of red, white, and blue, clogged the arteries leading to the event center where he would be speaking.
People swayed to the music being played by several pop-up musicians, brandished hand-held American flags or homemade signs, and greeted newly formed acquaintances like long-lost friends.
The hours leading up to the rally were a striking contrast to the daily, nonstop social media posts, press reports, and accusations from Democrats that the newly sworn-in president had dark ties to the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a web of other Russian interests. It was a sea of accusations that had plagued Trump since the day he defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016.
The national press coverage of his third trip here struggled to understand why he was coming to a city he didn’t even come close to winning in 2016 and a county (Mahoning) he also lost. Still, local Democrats such as former congressman Tim Ryan sure understood.
He told me in an interview several weeks later he knew exactly why Trump came to Youngstown and “the Valley,” saying it was because they look like a lot of hometowns across the country that have been forgotten.
“That imagery of him, showing up in a place few politicians do, projected to voters across the country that live in places like the Mahoning Valley that he shows up and hears their concerns,” Ryan, no fan then or now of Trump, said.
In 2016, Clinton won Mahoning County with 49% of the vote, defeating Trump by a hair. For perspective, just four years earlier, then-President Barack Obama crushed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by a whopping 28 points in the Mahoning Valley, earning 63% of the vote of this mostly white working-class voter base.
Those same working-class white voters, on whom Democrats relied to carry the state twice for the first Black president, would soon be called racist, uneducated, and angry just four years later for supporting Trump.
Fast-forward to last weekend when Trump, plagued by nonstop reports of his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments, held a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, and attracted more than 80,000 supporters in a state no Republican presidential candidate has won since then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988.
During the rally, Trump said he was “expanding the electoral map because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey,” adding, “We’re going to win the state of New Jersey.”
Maybe. Maybe not. Four years ago Trump lost the state by 16 percentage points. However, and this is big, here is what people are missing about his rally in Wildwood that is significant: what he talked about and who he was talking to.
Also, as a side note, Wildwood is the beach outside of Lake Erie’s Presque Isle that every working-class kid I grew up with went to in the summer, and it’s less than 90 miles from the Pennsylvania state line.
The headlines coming out of the rally were interesting in that it didn’t seem as though the national press was getting the point: “Trump attacks Biden, criminal charges at raucous New Jersey rally,” “Trump leads MAGA supporters in vulgar chants at New Jersey rally,” and “Springsteen Fans Roast Trump For Bizarre Boast About Size Of New Jersey Crowd,” to name a few. They completely missed the economic message he delivered that appealed not just to voters he already has but ones that have seemed long out of reach for a Republican candidate.
Messages, by the way, that began to chip away voters away from the Democrats in the Mahoning Valley eight years ago, where he discussed the dignity of work, the importance of a strong community which leads to a strong country, and recognizing why people feel so forgotten.
However, because Trump sprinkles in his usual Trumpisms that set the non-Trump voters’ heads on fire, as well as some Trump voters, the story becomes about what he said that offended rather than what he said that won over voters.
The Hudson Institute’s Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University, said the backdrop of Wildwood, home of the working-class vacation spot, with roller coasters and rides filling the background, could be Anywhere USA — and that is why it worked then in Youngstown in 2016 and has the potential to work now. It’s all about location and nostalgia.
Choosing places like Youngstown or Wildwood or Ashtabula, Ohio, or Erie, Pennsylvania, gives people a representation of cities and towns that either time, technology, and trade deals have left behind, or whose beaches and entertainment scream of chrome diners, mini-golf courses and Americana, rather than trendy, high-end bars.
And like Youngstown, which drew supporters from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, Wildwood draws supporters from the all-important state of Pennsylvania.
Sracic said that Trump choosing places such as Youngstown or Wildwood is not just about those particular towns.
“These choices symbolizes communities that are the heart of the blue-collar working-class community, so he is not just speaking to the voters here, he is projecting to voters in the similar places with similar experiences across the country,” Sracic said, reinforcing what he observed firsthand at that rally in Youngstown. It was little different than the experience rock star Billy Joel evoked with his 1982 ballad for the working class, “Allentown,” which limned the plight of out-of-work blue-collar workers and their families.
Ohio’s former congressman Ryan said back in 2017, after recognizing his party was in trouble with the very people who had put him in office, people saw themselves through the lens of the lyrics in the songs “the same way they see themselves through the rallies.”
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“Voters see me and know I get it,” Ryan said ahead of his decision to run for his party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and the U.S. Senate race in Ohio in 2022. He may have “gotten it,” but by 2022, the national Democratic Party did not project what Ryan intuitively knew, and he lost.
Whether Trump did it intellectually or just instinctively, what he mastered in New Jersey was nothing short of political brilliance — and the kind of thing that shifts the electorate just enough to make a difference in November.
