For nearly three decades, Dave Green built cars for General Motors at the Lordstown Assembly Plant in northeastern Ohio. Then, in November 2018, General Motors announced it would cease production of the Chevrolet Cruze vehicles then produced at the plant. Greene, president of United Auto Workers Local 1112, the union that represents workers at the plant, has spent months fighting the closure to no avail, and he has the backing of Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-N.Y., who helped set up a transition center at the local union hall to help thousands of laid-off new plant or other GM workers file for unemployment. But Green, who was born and raised near Lordstown, eventually had to leave his hometown. He moved to Bedford, Indiana, to work at the General Motors aluminum foundry. “I’m frustrated,” he said. On his way home, he often drove by the Lordstown factory. “I used to look at it and shake my head,” he said. Last month, while visiting his parents, he found that seeing the plant became more painful. “I saw it coming, but I just looked the other way,” Green told me. “I can’t even look at it.”
The Lordstown plant is located in the Mahaning Valley, once the second-largest steel-producing region in the country. Since the 1870s, the valley where Youngstown (“Steel City, U.S.A.”) is located has lost more than 50,000 high-paying steelworker jobs. In its heyday, the Lordstown plant employed more than 14,000 people; at the time of its closure, it was the last remaining large blue-collar anchor in the area. Against the backdrop of a sharp economic decline in the industrial Midwest, this part of Ohio has become a bellwether for dissatisfaction among working-class voters.
For decades, the Mahanen Valley, which consists primarily of Trumbull and Mahanen counties, was one of the most reliably Democratic areas in the country and a major part of Brown’s base. But in 2016, Donald Trump narrowly reversed that trend, and eight years later, support for him in Ohio has surged so much that Brown, a staunch Labor Democrat, can’t put enough distance away from the top spot despite being nearly eight percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris. According to AdImpact, Brown lost the race to Bernie Moreno, a luxury car dealer from suburban Cleveland, in the most expensive non-presidential election in U.S. history. Many observers praised the cryptocurrency lobby for spending $40 million to defeat Brown, who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee pushed for more regulation of the industry. But ultimately Brown lost because many working-class voters had stopped supporting Democrats. “When I saw the Mahaning Valley collapse, I thought it was over,” Green recalled Brown telling him on the phone. “I have to win the Mahaning Valley.”
Two years later, Brown hoped to return to the Senate by defeating Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, who was appointed to the state’s other Senate seat when J.D. Vance became vice president. (This election is only to complete the final two years of Vance’s term.) The race is critical to Democrats’ hopes of winning back the Senate and is already on track to match or exceed 2024 spending records. Brown has stepped up his populist message, focusing on the rising cost of living and growing resistance to data centers, and his success could reveal whether his party can recapture working-class Rust Belt voters it has lost for decades.