YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Toward the end of Monday night’s MAGA rally, after Jon Husted heard Donald Trump compliment his jawline and his “ass,” he thanked the president for making Ohio so much easier for Republicans to win.
“The Youngstown area, for decades, used to vote Democrat,” the Republican senator said. “And then you ran for office in 2016, and flipped it red forever.”
For a decade after that, Youngstown has become the first stop on what media critics derided as “Trump voter safaris,” journeys into the working-class counties that never voted Republican until he showed up. Husted’s claim of a permanently red state, however, isn’t adding up for Democrats: As soon as I arrived this week, they insisted that MAGA’s advance was over.
This isn’t because Democrats have snapped back to the image and values they ran on in the 1970s, when they had a lock on this state. No, the party insists that Republicans are in charge, making voters angry with their handling of the economy and the Middle East, so the culture-war politicking that worked for a decade won’t be as potent in November.
“People aren’t buying that again because they’ve realized you can’t deposit culture war into your bank account,” said Chris Anderson, the chairman of the Mahoning County Democrats, who’d spent years trying to limit their losses and defections. “You can’t fill your gas tank with it.”
Campaigns have a queasy rhythm to them — hype followed by panic followed by hype. We’ve reached the time in the cycle where the party that built a post-Labor Day polling lead begins to question its own confidence.
“They’re undersampling Republicans,” Speaker Mike Johnson told the faithful in South Texas on Tuesday, a part of that state that seemed to be following the same rightward march as northeast Ohio — and before that, Appalachia.
Republicans around Youngstown expected the trend of underestimating their vote to hold 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 that the GOP got an opening when “Clinton came in and lied about NAFTA,” which made local Democrats thrash around in search of a populist alternative.
“When Trump came around, the people just took to it, and so they’re giving us a shot,” Rulli added. “This area will not always stay Republican or Democrat.”
This year’s Democrats are making hard plays for northeast Ohio, at least to trim the GOP margins. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who lost the five most Democratic counties east of Cleveland for the first time in 2024, has painted Husted as a “Big Tech” shill, captured by the next industry that’ll threaten working-class jobs. Amy Acton, the party’s gubernatorial nominee, takes every chance to talk about her Youngstown roots; her ads often portray Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire GOP nominee, playing tennis as he daydreams about cutting Medicare and Social Security.
“I know what it’s like to not have the heat on, or live in a tent in the winter and experience a lot of neglect and abuse,” Acton told me on Tuesday, when I asked her to respond to the president rallying in Youngstown — specifically, about him telling voters they’d get rebate checks and energy bill relief only if Republicans won. “And I can also tell you that I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the institutions that gave me a chance.”
A Democratic comeback in Ohio is unlikely to look like the winning maps of Barack Obama’s campaigns, much less Bill Clinton’s. While losing to Bernie Moreno two years ago, Brown ran stronger in the suburbs of Cleveland and Cincinnati than he had in elections he actually won.
On Monday, the standard Trump rally scene of MAGA-hatted voters in line and liberals yelling at them from free speech zones showed how the coalitions had changed. The protesters skewed older; the younger they were, the more profanity they were comfortable putting on cardboard. A “progress pride” flag was hoisted on a pole, right under an American flag. Any Trump fan who objected got an earful about the “pedophile president” they were lined up for.
Trump, at this point, was not the rebel candidate who first showed up in Youngstown 10 years ago, with rally speeches about the threat of mass Muslim immigration. He was the party leader every Republican wanted to borrow some aura from, by communing with his superfans.
Ramaswamy posed for selfies a few steps away 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 at the 2024 Trump rally in Butler, Pa., where a failed assassin’s bullet clipped his ear; neither needed convincing that he was saving eastern Ohio, where they didn’t live, from neoliberalism.
The Covelli Centre, where Trump had rallied before, was a bit more than half-full when the president got onstage. Like Democrats used to, he described all the investments he was bringing to the region. Submarine construction was coming to Cleveland; nearby Warren was getting a new Kimberly-Clark plant; he would figure out how to save the local heating utility company.
The applause thinned out when he talked about how he’d rebranded artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence.”