The Republican presidential candidate may not be ‘intellectually there’, but supporters in Mahoning County say he’s better than the alternative

Autumn leaves colour the wooded hills along Ohio’s State Route 82 and the blue signs promoting presidential candidates along the verge pop against the scarlet and lemon foliage. Some pollsters have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a statistical tie in Ohio but the signs in this north-eastern corner of the state suggest this is Trump country.



Once a Democratic stronghold in a state that can make or break a presidential bid, Mahoning County, which encompasses the city of Youngstown and its environs, is lagging behind in the economic recovery. And its business leaders are keen to tell you why another four years of the same could cost them even more.

Nick Strimbu Inc has been trucking goods across the US from Brookfield, 12 miles north-east of Youngstown, since 1926. Outside its headquarters, a giant roadside electronic sign leaves little doubt as to whom its boss isn’t backing. “Defeat Crooked Hillary”, the sign flashes at passing traffic, 24 hours a day. President Bill Strimbu’s receptionist has a sign on her door that reads “Hillary For Prison 2016”.



An anti-Clinton sign along Ohio’s state route 82

Strimbu is convinced Clinton is crooked. The Clintons left the White House with no money, he points out. “So how, in eight years, do you go, without having a steady job, from zero net worth to $100m? All she did with that Clinton Foundation is take money from foreign governments,” he says. “I’d vote for Donald Duck before I’d vote for her.”



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But Strimbu is no diehard Trump fan, either; he would have preferred Ted Cruz to have won the Republican presidential nomination. Faced with the unacceptable and the unpalatable, the trucking boss believes he can make a strong business case to elect Trump and a stronger one still against Clinton. And, he says, a lot of people across the US feel the same way, no matter what the polls say. As with Britain’s surprise Brexit vote to leave the European Union, he argues the media and the pollsters have underestimated Trump’s support and cowed Trump supporters into silence.

“In the Republican primary, all the counties [nearby] voted for Trump. They’re aligning with the Republicans now because of the failed Democratic policies in this part of the country. They’re sick and tired of the promises from these politicians,” he says.

Strimbu isn’t the only one shilling for Trump with his sign. The election is inescapable in Youngstown. Local TV and radio is dominated by ads for the campaigns. Both candidates have been through town several times, and it’s easy to see why. Between 1904 and 2004, the presidential candidate who won in Ohio also won the presidency 24 of 26 times. Ohio is a swing state and Mahoning is a swing county within a swing state.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump campaigns In Youngstown, Ohio, in August. ‘Even though he’s not intellectually there on a lot of things, if he surrounds himself with the right people, we’re going to have this government running like a company,’ says Bill Strimbu. Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

A casual look at the economic numbers suggests things are going OK-ish in Ohio. Unemployment across the state has fallen dramatically under Obama (although here John Kasich, Ohio’s governor, a former Trump rival and a current critic, gets more credit) and in the state as a whole is just below the 4.9% national rate. In Mahoning County, unemployment is down from close to 14% in 2010 but is still close to 6%, and that number has risen close to a percentage point in the last year.

But for Clinton’s opponents, this election is more about existential economics than macro trends. Rightly or wrongly, Democratic critics in the county question whether they can survive four more years of business as usual, as dictated from Washington by denizens of either stripe. Trump, at least, promises change.

“Even though he’s not intellectually there, I don’t think, on a lot of things, if he surrounds himself with the right people, which I’m hoping and praying he does, if he gets elected, we’re going to have this government running like a company, and that’s the way it needs to be, I think,” says Strimbu.

This was once steel country. Coal and fracking took up the slack when steel was outsourced. Now those industries, too, are struggling. Politicians pass through every four years with promises but what local business leaders want is action.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor chronicles the rise and fall of the local steel industry. Photograph: Jeff Swensen/The Guardian

Trade is one of Strimbu’s big issues and it’s an area where he says Republicans and Democrats deserve equal blame. Half the trucks he buys now are produced in Mexico. He has seen China “destroy our steel industry, our rubber industry, our textile industry, our electronic industries. They put the American manufacturers out of business with low costs, and then they take control of the market share. Then the pricing goes right back up, because there’s no competition any more. We allowed them to do it.”



Trump has pledged to end “unfair trade deals”. If Clinton is elected, it will be business as usual, despite her newfound skepticism on trade, and American jobs will continue to be shipped overseas, says Strimbu.



Red tape is another bugbear. Among the examples he cites is a new rule on the neck size of of his drivers. Anyone with a neck over 16in has to be tested for sleep apnea. “Most of my guys are big,” he says. “It is crazy. The guys that are getting diagnosed with sleep apnea now, they have to get a CPAP machine, and they’re electric machines, so we’ve got to put electric converters in all the trucks, because they sleep in their trucks on long runs.” Trump has promised to slash business bureaucracy, too.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton visits a local bar during a campaign stop in Youngstown in March. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Strimbu is not a fan of Trump’s more controversial statements or entirely sold on his business record: “There’s a lot of bumps along the road,” he says. But the positives outweigh the negatives and he is not expecting perfection from a politician. “I’m a Christian man. It seems like that a lot of times in history, there’s a person that God uses as his tool to straighten things out. Even if you go back and read the Bible, a lot of the Bible stars like Moses and Saul, who ended up being Paul, weren’t very good people, but they were used to perpetuate the will of God. Because of their intervention, it happened.”



A short drive from Strimbu’s office through more wooded hills brings you to Warren Fabricating, a hulking industrial equipment plant that lies eerily silent in the early afternoon rain.



Regina “Gee Gee” Mitchell, president of War Fab, as it’s known, had to lay off the second shift recently. The company, started by her father 50 years ago, has lost its three largest accounts to bankruptcy in the last four years. “I’m extremely worried about the future of our country,” she says.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Regina Mitchell, CEO of Warren Fabricating: ‘I’m extremely worried about the future of our country.’ Photograph: Jeff Swensen/The Guardian

One of War Fab’s products is a giant revolving tub used in surface coalmining. They cost $6m-$8m each and the company used to make four a year. It shipped two in 2015 and hasn’t made one this year.



“My biggest frustration is this: in 2007, before President Obama even became president, he ran on the platform that he was going to bankrupt the coal industry. He had a press conference where he literally declared war on coal. I do not believe in leading through punitive regulations, or punishing an industry into compliance with your agenda,” she says.



Mitchell believes in climate change and agrees it should be addressed but, she says, business should be incentivized to change. “Punishing an industry into bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans out of work. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” she says. Clinton, she fears, will simply continue in Obama’s footsteps.



At the same time as business has slowed, War Fab’s costs have risen. The company’s healthcare costs increased by 14% following the introduction of Obama’s signature healthcare policy, the Affordable Care Act. A rule that covers the dependent children of insured workers up to the age of 26, touted as a boon for parents of college kids, has also led to the coverage of many of her workers’ adult offspring even though they are not in school. If those legal adults don’t have their own coverage, they turn to their parents’ insurance. The average number of dependents on War Fab’s insurance in 2012 was 2.2; in 2016 it is almost 4.9, and some of the ensuing costs have had to be passed on to workers.

The Federal Reserve’s decision to dig its way out of the last recession with record low interest rates has also hurt War Fab. Low rates have led to a strong dollar and for the first time ever, the company is losing bids to Canada in terms of costs. “I would lose whatever to China based on the labor and regulation rates. I used to always win those quotes from Canada. Now all that work is going north,” she says.



The cost of doing business in the US has become too high even for those who want to, says Mitchell. During the election, Trump has been hit several times for using Chinese steel in his building while railing against their trading practices. “Well, we use Chinese steel too,” she says. “You have to to survive.”



War Fab has remodeled and reshaped its business to meet the trends and Mitchell is confident she can do it again. But she says the federal government has done precious little to help and in the meantime she is denying work to a community crying out for it. She says she turns away people looking for employment every day.



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“I feel like there’s almost been a feeling of punishment over the last eight years with punitive regulations, economic policies that don’t make sense for American manufacturing,” she says.

Trump wasn’t Mitchell’s first choice, either. She still prefers Marco Rubio, the Florida senator Trump savagely knocked out of presidential primary. But she hasn’t been fazed by the sexist rants that have dominated coverage of the candidate. “I’m a woman in a male-dominated field. I’ve been in the steel industry for 25 years. I have dealt with men like Donald Trump for decades, but I have never let it impede my progress,” she says.

She hopes the businessman will somehow rewire a Washington that short-circuits at the mention of compromise. But she doesn’t sound entirely convinced and is worried that more gridlock in Washington will only hurt the local economy. Her mother is intending to spoil her ballot and write in Rubio’s name.

“My biggest fear is that it doesn’t matter who wins this election come November 8. If the attitude stays the same, there will be no progress in our great country. It might sound hokey to say this, but it’s true when we say united we stand and divided we fall.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brett Conner of Freshmade 3D stands with his presidential campaign bobbleheads: ‘Hillary’s head is a bit more balanced.’ Photograph: Jeff Swensen/The Guardian

The jewel of downtown Youngstown is the Butler Institute of American Art, the first museum dedicated to US artwork. In its marbled foyer last week, two studies of Youngstown’s future, life-sized bobbleheads of Trump and Clinton, stood nodding at visitors.

The models were made by Freshmade 3D, a local 3D-printing business based at the Youngstown Business Incubator, a part of the city’s small but growing tech scene.

“Hillary’s head is a bit more balanced than Trump’s,” says Brett Conner, the company’s chief technology office. But don’t go reading too much into that.

Obama has declared Youngstown the center for 3D-printing technology, a move aimed at revitalizing manufacturing in a city that still all too visibly bears the scars of industrial collapse. The president even gave the project a shout-out in his 2013 State of the Union address.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Youngstown retains the scars of industrial collapse even as its tech scene grows. Photograph: Jeff Swensen/The Guardian

There are signs of the hipsterfication often taken as a harbinger of urban renewal. You can buy a hot dog sprinkled with fried crickets and “spiked” milkshakes at Suzie’s Dogs and Drafts. Old buildings are being converted into lofts, and work has begun on a DoubleTree hotel, the first hotel to open downtown in decades.

But despite all this support, Conner is cagey about who will get his vote. Freshmade 3D, which usually makes less photogenic products such as specialist car parts, has benefited from the attention Obama (and his bobbleheads) has brought. At the same time he says business taxes are too high and his company is reliant on the welfare of – and services provided by – larger companies for its survival. He worries that politicians push their own agenda and don’t see the bigger picture.

“I can see the advantages and disadvantages to both sides,” he says. “The polarization has caused me to step back a little bit. Clearly, if everyone is so polarized then the political parties are not addressing needs.” He says he is trying to take a “holistic” view of the situation before he casts his ballot.

As we wrap up the interview, a crocodile of schoolchildren from United Elementary in nearby Hanoverton enters the foyer and comes to a stop in front of their nodding potential presidents. “Who are you going to vote for?” asks the photographer. “Trump,” they chorus.