For almost thirty years, Dave Green built cars for General Motors at the Lordstown Assembly plant, in northeast Ohio. Then, in November, 2018, G.M. announced that it would end production of the Chevy Cruze, the car that the plant manufactured at the time. Green, the president of United Auto Workers Local 1112, the union representing the plant’s employees, spent months fruitlessly fighting the closure, drawing support from Senator Sherrod Brown, who helped set up a transition center at the local’s union hall to assist thousands of newly laid-off workers in transferring to other G.M. plants, filing unemployment claims, or looking for different jobs. But Green, who was born and raised near Lordstown, eventually had to uproot himself, too. He moved to Bedford, Indiana, to work in a G.M. aluminum-casting plant. “I was depressed,” he said. On return trips home, he often drove past the Lordstown plant. “I used to always look at it and shake my head,” he said. Last month, on a visit to his parents, he noticed that the sight of the plant had grown even more painful. “I saw it coming up, and I just looked the other way,” Green told me. “I couldn’t even look at it.”
The Lordstown plant is in the Mahoning Valley, once the second-largest steel-producing area in the country. Since the nineteen-seventies, the valley, home to Youngstown (“Steeltown, U.S.A.”), has lost more than fifty thousand well-paying steelworker jobs. At its peak, the Lordstown plant employed more than fourteen thousand people; at the time of its closing, it was the last large blue-collar anchor left in the area. Amid the industrial Midwest’s acute economic decline, this part of Ohio has become a bellwether for disaffection among working-class voters.
For decades, the Mahoning Valley, which is primarily made up of Trumbull and Mahoning counties, was one of the country’s most reliably Democratic regions, and a major part of Brown’s base. But in 2016 Donald Trump narrowly flipped the area, and, eight years later, support for him in Ohio had grown so much that Brown, a staunch labor Democrat, was unable to sufficiently distance himself from the top of the ticket, despite outperforming Kamala Harris by nearly eight points. Brown lost the valley, and the race, to Bernie Moreno, a luxury-car dealer from suburban Cleveland, in the most expensive non-Presidential election in American history, according to AdImpact. Many observers credited the crypto lobby, which spent forty million dollars to defeat Brown, who, as the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, had pushed for more regulation of the industry. But, ultimately, Brown lost because many working-class voters had moved on from the Democrats. “Soon as I saw the Mahoning Valley went down, I thought it was done,” Green recalls Brown telling him over the phone. “I got to win the Mahoning Valley.”
Two years later, Brown is hoping to return to the Senate by defeating Jon Husted, the Republican lieutenant governor who was appointed to the state’s other Senate seat after J. D. Vance became Vice-President. (The election is only to complete the final two years of Vance’s term.) The race is crucial to Democratic hopes of winning back the Senate, and is already on track to match or surpass the 2024 spending record. Brown has sharpened his populist messaging to focus on the rising cost of living and the growing backlash against data centers, and his success may reveal whether his party is able to reclaim the working-class Rust Belt voters it has been hemorrhaging for decades.
