Can Democrats Win Back Labor?

Earlier this month, I drove past the Lordstown plant, which contains more than six million square feet of manufacturing space and now stands barely used, a sort of physical embodiment of the vicissitudes of deindustrialization. Its travails over the past decade have been a major political liability for Trump, and function as a microcosm of the struggle to create industrial jobs in an economy that has devalued them for the past half century.

In 2017, at a packed rally in nearby Youngstown, President Trump implored his audience, “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.” The valley’s factories, he promised, would be “all coming back.” By then, G.M. had already cut one of its three shifts at the Lordstown plant. To divert outrage after it shut down entirely, two years later, Trump appeared to blame Green, the union leader, personally for the plant’s closure, writing on Twitter that Green “ought to get his act together and produce.” (One of the actual culprits was Trump weakening the Obama Administration’s fuel-efficiency standards, which reduced the need for companies to build small cars like the Cruze.)

Later, trying to save face, Trump pushed G.M. to sell the plant. An electric-truck startup called Lordstown Motors bought it. Weeks before the 2020 election, Trump showcased one of the company’s trucks on the White House lawn. “Beyond the plant,” he said, “it’s incredible what’s happened to the area. It’s booming now.” But the following year one of the Lordstown Motors’ prototypes burst into flames on its first-ever road test. Soon afterward, an investment-research firm alleged that the company had made misleading claims about pre-orders. (An S.E.C. probe later found the company had misled investors; Lordstown Motors paid nearly twenty-six million dollars to settle the S.E.C.’s charges, though it did not admit to any wrongdoing.) In 2023, Lordstown Motors filed for bankruptcy.

By then, the plant had been purchased by Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, which did little with the property until last year, when it sold the site to SoftBank, a Japanese investment firm. The plant is now part of the Stargate project, a seven-site, five-hundred-billion-dollar A.I.-infrastructure build-out backed by Trump and involving Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank. Stargate’s future has looked increasingly uncertain after Oracle, already heavily leveraged, filed paperwork to shield itself from upcoming debt payments for another Stargate data-center campus, in New Mexico. Still, OpenAI and SoftBank recently announced plans to build a new data center at the Lordstown site, which will be on one of the plant’s parking lots.

Brown grew up in Mansfield, a small city in central Ohio anchored by industrial manufacturers—Westinghouse, G.M., Ohio Brass—and the blue-collar union employees who worked for them. His father was a doctor; his mother, a community activist. When Brown was a senior at Yale, the Democratic chairman of his home county in Ohio recruited him to run for state representative. He won, becoming, at the time, the youngest person elected to that body in Ohio’s history. His first statewide race came in 1982, when he was elected secretary of state at age thirty. A decade later, as the fight over offshoring and NAFTA reached a frenzy, Brown won a U.S. House seat in northern Ohio, and trade became his central focus. This put him at odds with Bill Clinton, his party’s newly elected President.

“He became a huge leader from that fight onward for the whole trade world,” Lori Wallach, who then led Public Citizen’s trade program, told me. A loose, bipartisan political coalition emerged, primarily to prevent the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from being enacted. It spanned older New Deal Democrats, young labor-minded Democrats like Brown, and even far-right Republicans, an emerging political strain that attacked free trade from an economic-nationalist perspective, helping lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. The coalition battled the establishment wings of both parties. But it failed to stop NAFTA; a majority of Republicans in the House voted for it, as did more than a hundred Democrats.

In the following years, Democrats increasingly came to be identified as the party of free trade, weakening the bond between organized labor and the Party that had been forged during the New Deal era. NAFTA’s enactment paved the way for the passage of another bill, which established permanent normal trade relations with China, facilitating its entry into the World Trade Organization (W.T.O.) in 2001 and accelerating the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States. Despite the dissent of Brown and others, seventy-three House Democrats voted for this, too. Still, the number of defections was fewer than for NAFTA; Brown and others were moving the needle. Brown became the leader of the House Trade Working Group, a caucus of Democratic representatives opposed to free-trade agreements who whipped votes on those deals. Brown spearheaded the opposition to the Central America Free Trade Agreement, a deal with five Central American countries and the Dominican Republic pushed by President George W. Bush. The deal passed the House but with only fifteen Democrats voting for it. The following year, Brown was elected to the first of three Senate terms.

In the 2008 Presidential election, Barack Obama recognized the political salience of deindustrialization and wanted to tap into the coalition that Brown had helped create. At a primary debate in Cleveland, Obama admonished Hillary Clinton for her past support for NAFTA; he ran ads in Rust Belt states attacking John McCain for opposing Buy American provisions. In 2009, shortly after the auto bailout, President Obama and Brown visited the Lordstown plant to celebrate the arrival of the Cruze, the fuel-efficient model that G.M. would later discontinue. Yet throughout his Presidency, Obama largely continued Clinton’s embrace of free trade. He pushed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sprawling trade deal, and never sought to renegotiate or withdraw from NAFTA, which was continuing to hollow out the Mahoning Valley. Around that time, Delphi, an auto-parts manufacturer, which had been shipping jobs to Mexico for years, closed a plant in the area that at times had employed as many as thirteen thousand people. “I think the people have become jaded there,” Green, now the U.A.W.’s regional director for Ohio and Indiana, said. He rattled off a litany of failed companies that had been promoted as the valley’s economic saviors. “They also remember and blame Bill Clinton and NAFTA for the enormous amount of job losses. There’s a lot of hard feelings around the Democrats, just because of NAFTA, that people never really got over, or weren’t able to express in an election cycle until Trump came along.”

In 2016, Trump’s campaign was able to co-opt much of what had made Brown electorally successful in a place like Ohio. Once he was in office, Trump renegotiated NAFTA, replacing it with the United States-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement, which includes a pro-labor provision that allows the U.S. to investigate labor-rights violations in Mexico. (Brown was primarily responsible for that provision.) Brown and most Democrats voted for Trump’s deal, but it has done little to stanch the flow of jobs to Mexico. Ohio’s rightward movement continued, and by the 2018 midterms Brown was the only Ohio Democrat holding statewide office. Unsure how to survive the political headwinds, Brown appeared to tack toward the center. “I think it’s a terrible mistake if the Democratic nominee would publicly support Medicare for All,” he told CNN in 2019. By 2024, during his doomed reëlection campaign, he was running ads in which he wore a bulletproof vest and appeared with Border Patrol officers while boasting of his support “for the most conservative immigration bill in decades.” Then he decided to include Bill Clinton at his final campaign rally, confounding some observers, given the former President’s role in ushering in NAFTA and China’s admittance to the W.T.O. Brown lost to Moreno by four points.

These days, Brown seems keen to keep his focus on economic populism. At an early-voting rally in Columbus this month, I asked Brown about public anger over data centers. He called the facilities “part of the rigged system that I’ve been fighting against my whole career” and described Husted as contributing to that system on every issue. “He’s the data-center guy and the Wall Street guy,” he said.

Polls suggest that Brown has a slim lead in the race—a tight contest, given high inflation and Trump’s historic unpopularity, that perhaps reflects Husted’s effort to portray Brown as someone who has been in D.C. too long. (A recent poll showed that twenty-five per cent of Ohio’s likely voters thought Brown was still the incumbent.) Patricia Spencer, a retired lawyer who lived in the Mahoning Valley for decades, attended Brown’s rally with her husband. Spencer has been a Democrat since the fourth grade, and lamented how the valley’s economic collapse changed its political character. She is frustrated with the Democratic old guard; she and her husband expressed admiration for younger politicians such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed. “It’s not just Sherrod; it’s all of them,” she said. “They weren’t effective. You may have had the right ideas, you might have had the right issues. But, for whatever reason, you were not effective. You did not stop this.” She went on, “I hope to God Sherrod wins, but what does that do for the future?”

The following day, I took a drive with Dan Adams, a sixty-one-year-old retired assembly-line worker, around the Lordstown plant, where he started as a temporary employee in 1989. When Adams began working at the plant, where his father and brother worked, too, G.M. offered three shifts per day, and the line never stopped. He became active in the union and was elected to Local 1112’s executive board. Over the years, Adams did a host of tricky, repetitive jobs—installing wiring harnesses in car doors as they moved down the line, drilling screws into instrument panels. (“That’s three thousand two hundred and twenty-eight screws a day,” he said, massaging his wrist. “You’re gonna get some tension in there.”) Then the plant shut down when he was seven years shy of the thirty he needed to collect his pension. He took a job at a Cadillac plant in Lansing, Michigan, while his wife and two children stayed behind. He drove back on weekends, except during the winter, when he took all the overtime he could get. Sometimes he worked seven days a week.

Like Adams, hundreds of other workers left the valley for good after the plant closed, taking their families with them, further diluting the presence of organized labor and hastening the area’s rightward political drift. In 2022, G.M., in partnership with Ultium, a South Korean company, and helped by billions in federal loans for green technology from the Biden Administration, opened a lithium-ion-battery plant on the old G.M. factory grounds. But the plant was nonunion; starting pay was sixteen dollars and fifty cents per hour. The union, and congressional allies such as Brown, pressured the Administration to insure that the new plants became unionized. They worried that the electric-vehicle market, boosted by government subsidies, would become a low-wage carve-out in auto manufacturing. “These workers feel betrayed because Presidents of both parties, from Bush to Clinton, then Bush 2, then Obama, then Trump, have sold them out,” Brown told the Times during the Ultium contract negotiations. “We keep pushing the White House to do more.”

By the end of the year, workers at the Ultium plant voted overwhelmingly to join the U.A.W., and wages for some of them have risen to more than forty-three dollars per hour. Adams was able to transfer back to Lordstown to finish out the remaining years required for his pension. But Trump’s termination of electric-vehicle tax credits, for both consumers and manufacturers, has devastated the plant. In January, nearly fourteen hundred workers, including Adams, were laid off. In August, he and several hundred others were called back, but some six hundred jobs were permanently eliminated. Last month, he worked his last shift, without fanfare. He never liked working in the battery plant—the safety gear and clean rooms made him feel confined, and he was frustrated by how unaware the younger workforce was of what the U.A.W. had done for them.

We drove to a gate where he used to punch in, and he pointed out his favorite parking spot. Nearby were stacks of metal piping and other construction materials for the data center that was now being built on the lot. Adams remains a loyal Democrat, and is grateful for Brown’s support of his union. “If we called Sherrod, he was there,” Adams said. “Never a staffer.” Still, Adams wondered whether Brown couldn’t have done “a little bit more” to fight the plant closure. “I wish that another generation had gotten a chance to go in there and say, ‘I’m gonna raise my family, I’ve got a good wage. I’ve got union protection,’ and the name Local 1112 stays alive.”

Despite its economic decline, the valley’s political importance has arguably grown. A few days after I met with Adams, Brown stopped at a bar in Youngstown, saying that he had visited the area every month for the past decade. “Who knows better than people in this valley how the system is being rigged?” he told the crowd. The week after, Trump returned to the site of his 2017 “Don’t move” rally, joined by Husted. Belying his long history as a Chamber of Commerce Republican, Husted ran through familiar tropes of right-wing populism, blaming Democrats exclusively for fifty years of the valley’s job losses. “They shipped their steel jobs overseas,” he said. “They shipped their auto jobs overseas.” He claimed that Trump had turned the valley “red forever.” Trump, in his speech, called Brown a “Dumocrat” who believes that “Christopher Columbus should not be in Columbus, Ohio.” Just then, members of the crowd assaulted a female protester in a shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files,” grabbing her hair and punching her in the face until police pulled her away. Trump called the woman a “paid protester,” “scum,” and “a fat guy.”

The speech, in which the President praised Husted’s “ass,” attacked Somali citizens, and venerated A.I. (“It’s not artificial anymore. It’s superintelligence . . . and everybody likes it”), also included a through-the-looking-glass celebration of Ohio’s economy. “After years of steel mills and factories closing across Ohio, our steel industry is roaring back to life,” he said. “Manufacturing is booming.” Neither Trump nor Husted mentioned the Ultium layoffs, or a truck plant near Dayton that had closed last month. The crowd was raucous, but it was hard to hide the fact that it was not even close to capacity. Attendance was reported to be less than half the size it had been nine years earlier, when Trump urged locals not to sell their homes. The empty seats reminded me of something Dan Adams had told me: “I think this election could be the beginning of the end of MAGA.” Adams added a warning to companies, along with politicians from both parties, about trying to sell false assurances of economic restoration. “There’s only so many times that this valley can raise their hand and say, ‘We got kicked in the balls again,’ ” he said. “If you’re not gonna keep your promises, don’t even fucking come around here.” ♦