YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Near the end of Monday night’s MAGA rally, after Jon Husted heard Donald Trump compliment his jawline and “ass,” he thanked the president for making Ohio much easier for Republicans to win.
“For decades, the Youngstown area voted Democratic,” the Republican senator said. “And then you ran for office in 2016 and made it red forever.”
For a decade, Youngstown became the first stop on what media critics called “Trump election safaris,” trips to working-class counties that had never voted Republican before his arrival. However, Husted’s assertion of a permanent red state doesn’t sit well with Democrats: As soon as I arrived this week, they insisted that MAGA’s advance was over.
It’s not because Democrats have returned to the image and values they ran on in the 1970s when they controlled this state. No, the party insists that Republicans are in charge, making voters angry at their handling of the economy and the Middle East, so the culture war politics that worked for a decade won’t be as powerful in November.
“People aren’t buying this anymore because they’ve realized you can’t put a culture war in your bank account,” said Chris Anderson, chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party, who has spent years trying to limit their losses and defections. “You can’t fill your gas tank with it.”
Campaigns have a nauseating pace – hype followed by panic followed by hype. We have reached the point in the cycle where the party that built a lead in the polls after Labor Day begins to question its own confidence.
“They’re undersampling Republicans,” Speaker Mike Johnson told worshipers in South Texas on Tuesday, a part of that state that seemed to be following the same march to the right as Northeast Ohio — and before that, Appalachia.
Republicans around Youngstown expected the trend of undercounting their vote to continue this year, but not accelerate. They agreed that Democrats would at least be competitive. Rep. Michael Rulli, who represents the Mahoning Valley in Congress, said the Republican Party gained an opening when “Clinton came in and lied about NAFTA,” leaving local Democrats scrambling for a populist alternative.
“When Trump came, people just accepted it, and so they gave us a chance,” Rulli added. “This area will not always remain Republican or Democratic.”
This year’s Democrats are making a strong push for Northeast Ohio, at least to reduce the Republican Party’s margins. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who lost the five most Democratic counties east of Cleveland for the first time in 2024, described Husted as a “Big Tech” idiot, captured by the next industry that will threaten working-class jobs. Amy Acton, the party’s gubernatorial candidate, takes every opportunity to talk about her Youngstown roots; its ads often show Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican Party’s billionaire candidate, playing tennis as he dreams of eliminating Medicare and Social Security.
“I know what it’s like to not have heat, or to live in a tent in the winter and have a lot of neglect and abuse,” Acton told me Tuesday, when I asked him to respond to the president’s rally in Youngstown — in particular, about him telling voters they would get rebate checks and energy bill relief only if Republicans won. “And I can also tell you that I wouldn’t be here today without the institutions that gave me a chance.”
A Democratic comeback in Ohio is unlikely to resemble the winning cards of Barack Obama’s campaigns, much less those of Bill Clinton. Although he lost to Bernie Moreno two years ago, Brown ran stronger in the Cleveland and Cincinnati suburbs than in the elections he actually won.
The usual scene at the Trump rally on Monday, with MAGA-hat-wearing voters lining up and liberals shouting at them from free-speech zones, showed how much the coalitions had changed. The protesters were older; the younger they were, the more comfortable they were putting profanity on cardboard. A “Pride of Progress” flag was raised on a flagpole, right under an American flag. All the Trump fans who opposed him were paying attention to the “pedophile president” they were running for.
Trump, at this point, was not the rebel candidate who first showed up in Youngstown a decade ago, with rally speeches about the threat of mass Muslim immigration. He was the leader of the party from which all Republicans wanted to borrow an aura, by communing with his superfans.
Ramaswamy posed for selfies just feet from MAGA activist Vince Fusca. Blake Marnell, who wears a brick-patterned suit to every Trump rally, got a seat near the main stage. Both men were present at the 2024 Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a failed assassin’s bullet severed his ear; neither needed convincing that he was saving eastern Ohio, where they didn’t live, from neoliberalism.
The Covelli Center, where Trump had previously rallied, was a little more than half full when the president took the stage. As Democrats once did, he outlined all the investments he was bringing to the region. Submarine construction was coming to Cleveland; nearby Warren was getting a new Kimberly-Clark factory; he would figure out how to save the local heating company.
The applause subsided when he explained how he had renamed artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence.”
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