WEIRTON, W.Va. — The Ohio Valley is filled with registered Democrats, the kind that hung portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy on their living room walls. It is made of coal and steel towns and union workers, and stretches from the Pittsburgh exurbs across West Virginia’s panhandle into Ohio.
But here in Weirton — where Weirton Steel Company employed 12,000 people and now only 900 — many say they will cast their ballots for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They talk about him over beers at local taverns and at church socials.
For many of those in the unions, he’s the first Republican for whom they’ll vote — even as national unions, including the United Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO, have endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“When the steel industry was going good and the coal was good, it was blue,” said George Psaros, 76, a retired Weirton Steel engineer who voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and is undecided in this contest. “Well, the world has changed.”
Ever since Democrats like Bill Clinton embraced free trade, West Virginia has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in greater margins. West Virginians sided with Democrat Michael Dukakis instead of George H. W. Bush in 1988, only one of 10 states to vote blue. But by 2000, George W. Bush won the state by 6 percent of the vote, and in 2012, Mitt Romney won by more than 20 percent.
Now even one of the most reliably Democratic groups — union members — may be turning red, drawn by Trump’s free-trade bashing and resentful of Clinton’s past support for certain international trade agreements.“I don’t know what Trump would do if he’s elected,” said Mark Glyptis, president of the United Steelworkers Local 2911 and a Trump supporter, who voted for Obama in the past two elections. “But I know what Hillary would do.”
If Trump wants to flip the electoral map and win in November, this may be his most promising strategy. His critique of trade deals may not only help him win Weirton and the rest of West Virginia, but also other, more critical industrial belt states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Nationally, union households have increasingly voted for conservative candidates, data show. In 1996, only 30 percent of union households voted for Republican candidates. In 2012, that increased to 40 percent, and political analysts expect that rise this election cycle.Trump appears to be accelerating that schism between unions and Democrats, especially in pockets of the country where blue-collar manufacturing jobs once drove local economies.
[Trump's anti-trade rhetoric rattles unions]
“What we’re seeing is not surprising, but what is surprising is that we’re seeing Trump accelerating that rift,” said Robert Rupp, professor of history and political science at West Virginia Wesleyan College. “As we’re watching Trump disintegrate, [union members] are the one solid group that will stick by him until November because his economic and populist message resonated. And it’s not just in West Virginia and it’s thought the industrial states.”
And increasingly, these distressed workers are associating free trade with the Democrats. In Glyptis’s office hangs a poster that says “Free Traders are Traitors.” To many this election season, that means Democrats.“If you’re working in a state with a tangible part of its economy in manufacturing, you’re going to be pretty concerned about Hillary Clinton and especially a Democratic Senate,” said Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow at Chapman University in Southern California.
Trump this month in Detroit reinforced his bid to win over blue-collar voters by proclaiming: “Americanism, not globalism, will be our new credo.”
“American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring,” he said in an economic address in Detroit. “We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation. It will be American hands that rebuild this country, and it will be American energy — mined from American sources — that powers this country. It will be American workers who are hired to do the job.”
[Finally, some good news for blue-collar workers]
Some people in this part of West Virginia said in interviews they are angry about their community’s condition and blame the Democratic Party, which for generations has called itself “of the working class.” At the heart of that discontent is economic disillusionment and a feeling that Washington Democrats have sacrificed their well-being to push through more international agreements.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/18/why-these-die-hard-democr...
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