"China’s 2000 admission to the World Trade Organization and the 2004
Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement inundated
U.S. markets with cheap foreign metal."
8/18/16, "Why these diehard Democrats are rooting for Trump," Washington Post, Jacob Bogage, Weirton, West Virginia
"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....
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.”
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.
Take the end of Weirton’s Main Street. It
has been swallowed up over the years by tires weighed down by coils of
tin and beams of steel. The road is undriveable, not that anyone drives
this part of town anymore. Brown water fills potholes in the street, and
when it rains, water pours down the side of ruffled roofs into
hollowed-out blast furnaces.
Workers here — Democratic,
union-dues-paying workers — are tired of that economic stagnancy, and
many say Trump will do something about it. He’ll revitalize their towns
throughout the valley and Appalachia, he’ll bring back coal and steel,
he’ll return jobs lost over decades of globalization and modernization.
“You
have to get a decent-paying job, that’s the first step of anything,”
said John Balzano, 78, and the Local 2911 benefits coordinator, who said
he is undecided about for whom to vote. He has worked at the mill since
age 21. “And it branches out, whether you’re going to be a good family
man, whether you’re going to get a divorce, whether you’re going to live
in the community, whether you’re going to become a good,
community-minded person, the job will dictate that. We don’t have them
around here.”
Six or seven workers at one point manned each blast
furnace in Weirton. Residents brag that those fires produced the
world’s best steel. Separate machines poured the molten metal into
square molds, while still others took those molds and flattened them
into sheets....
A flood of
imports from Mexico and China over the past two decades meant that
Weirton didn’t need to make as much steel. Mill owners downsized slowly
at first, then rapidly to keep up with international competition.
In
its heyday, the plant filled with 12,000 workers and its employees from
three states — West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania — ran the community
center and plowed snow from the streets.
Wheeling-Pittsburgh
Steel had mills in Steubenville, Ohio, directly across the Ohio River,
and Mingo Junction, Ohio, four miles west. Both have shuttered.
Weirton
Mayor Harold E. “Bubba” Miller ran for office a year ago on a campaign
of economic diversification. He worked in the mill for 33 years before
retiring and soon after saw his pension sliced in half and his benefits
evaporate. He owns a hall in town where he sells buffalo wings on
weeknights and rents the space out for weddings and other gatherings on
weekends.
During his election bid, he felt the same anger voters
are taking out now on Clinton. They feel spurned by trade deals, he said
as he sipped coffee at the union hall.
“We didn’t see a damn
thing in return,” he said of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
China’s 2000 admission to the World Trade Organization and the 2004
Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement inundated
U.S. markets with cheap foreign metal.
Voters here, many of them
union members and nearly all with personal ties to Local 2911, see the
valley’s economic straits as a social issue that requires Trump’s “Make
America Great Again” ethos.
Unemployment in the valley reached 15
percent in 2010 and did not get 10 percent for three years, according
to federal data. The region is still struggling to add jobs.
In
nearby Ohio, blocks on end in downtown Steubenville are without
ground-level shops. Mingo Junction has two viable businesses on its Main
Street....
Weirton and the valley are economically transitioning, and there are
signs of success here, economic development officials point out. Weirton
is buying up abandoned mill sites and pitching them to other
businesses....
And the local organized
labor community has embraced “business friendly” regulations, and
protectionist trade policies, to speed up that transition.
Although Trump’s rhetoric has been divisive and egotistical, residents prefer his economic approach, even as it lacks detail.
“I’ve
never been a fan of his,” said Miller, Weirton’s mayor, “but he’ll look
at the economy a little different and jobs a little differently than
Hillary, because he’s put together deals that have worked.""
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