Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

CAMBRIDGE, Ohio—The angry old white men in this no-frills meeting room in a $55-a-night hotel off Interstate 70 are mostly retired truck drivers and coal miners, the kind of blue-collar voters without college degrees who tend to get quoted in Rust Belt diners, defending President Donald Trump. They believe the system is rigged, that America has broken its promises to its working class, that the citizens who transport its goods, extract its energy, and shower after work rather than before have been shafted and forgotten. And while “economic anxiety” has become a punchline for pundits who believe Trump’s popularity with this demographic has more to do with racial resentment than trade or wages or health care, the economic anxiety in this room is real. These retirees are at risk of losing the pensions they worked for decades to secure, which is why they’ve gathered to hear the man they trust the most to fight for them in Washington.

It’s not Trump. In this room, at least, it’s Sherrod Brown, the liberal Democratic senator from Ohio, a career politician who has spent the past 43 years in public office. Brown ambles to the front and quickly outlines the little-known problem of America’s failing multi-employer pension funds, which now endanger the retirement incomes of 1.5 million blue-collar workers. He does not declare that he alone can fix it. Instead, he provides a detailed inside-the-Beltway explanation of how he tried to fix it in an omnibus spending bill, only to get stymied by Republican leaders, so he got himself appointed co-chair of a bipartisan committee to address it, but his Republican colleagues are still reluctant to take a stand for union members, so he’s tried to persuade them to help by framing it as a potential disaster for business as well as labor. Brown has dedicated his career to labor issues like this; he wears a canary lapel pin as a reminder of the days before union protections and government regulations when canaries in coal mines were the only safety precautions for workers underground.


“Some of the Republicans hope this mess will just go away, but believe me, it won’t,” Brown says in a gravelly rasp that makes him sound like a rabble-rousing Louis Armstrong. “This is as important as anything I’ve ever done in politics.”

The industrial Midwest has long been buffeted by economic dislocation, and many voters blame trade and globalization for the hollowed-out factory towns that have become a cliché of stories about the region. Enter Trump, who won the White House in 2016 by flipping several key Midwestern states from blue to red; his 8-point romp in Ohio was his biggest turnaround of a state won by Barack Obama. Trump particularly outperformed his Republican predecessors with working-class white men over 55, perhaps because he promised to revive the state’s shuttered mines and mills, perhaps because he lashed out at corporate and Wall Street elites as well as immigrants and minorities, perhaps because he came off as an unfiltered outsider to a demographic that didn’t trust Hillary Clinton or politics as usual. And as president, Trump has imposed tariffs against partners like Canada and the European Union as well as competitors like China, vowing to protect America’s industrial heartland by rejecting globalization.

Image Top: Republic Steel in Lorain, Ohio, where production partially restarted in September, bringing 80 new jobs to the city. Bottom: Active since 1846, the Canfield County Fair is the largest county fair in Ohio, bringing 350,000 visitors each year. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

But a new POLITICO/AARP poll suggests that two years later, only 43 percent of Ohioans approve of Trump’s performance as president, and about the same percentage of respondents approve of his trade wars. Meanwhile, Brown is trouncing his Trump-loving Republican challenger, Rep. Jim Renacci, by 16 points, perhaps because he comes off as the kind of Washington insider who battles to save working men’s pensions, perhaps because the GOP’s hold on America’s manufacturing base is slipping. In 2018, Trump country looks more like Brown country—and many lesser-known Ohio Democrats think they can follow his populist path to victory, in part by persuading older blue-collar voters that only one party cares about their economic security.

“You’ll hear all kinds of opinions about Trump, but everyone in this room knows Sherrod works his tail off for us,” says Jeff Wharton, a 73-year-old former Marine who spent three years in Vietnam and then 48 years in the coal mines.

Trump’s numbers in Ohio are not as bad as they are nationally, but twice as many strongly disapprove as strongly approve, a dangerous sign for Republicans who usually rely on an intensity advantage in off-year elections. It’s tempting for Democrats to rally their base by taking shots at Trump’s chaotic, reality-show presidency, and Brown couldn’t resist sniping during his pension event that “this White House is like a retreat for Wall Street executives.” But Brown’s campaign strategy is mostly about bashing the industry-friendly Republican agenda without dwelling on the president who’s driving it. He’s running the traditional Democratic playbook of progressive pocketbook issues, promising workers he’ll keep pushing to protect their health care, retirement security and bargaining rights, while fighting the efforts of Republicans like Renacci to cut their bosses’ taxes.

It’s basically the same playbook Democrats have run on for decades. But while proudly socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders and New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soak up national attention, Ohio Democrats believe this familiar meat-and-potatoes strategy can help them reclaim this weather-vane state in 2018, and win back some of the older voters who have been drawn to the GOP’s culture-based appeals. There was already a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment last month when Democrat Danny O’Connor, a young county recorder of deeds, nearly upset a better-known and better-funded Republican state senator in a special election to represent a staunchly Republican congressional district around Columbus. Democrats have a chance to flip several swingier Ohio districts in November, and former Democratic state attorney general Richard Cordray, after taking on Wall Street as head of Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is in a tight race for governor against current Attorney General Mike DeWine. While cable news may be all-Trump-all-the-time, the Democratic message in all those races has been much more about insurance premiums, school funding and Social Security than the Russia investigation, Stormy Daniels or Trump’s tweets. Democrats figure the midterms will be a referendum on Trump no matter what they say about him, so they aren’t saying much about him.

Top: At the Lorain County Labor Day Festival, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown delivers a campaign speech. Bottom left: Mike DeWine, Ohio's current attorney general and Republican nominee for governor, chats with voters at the Canfield County Fair. Bottom right: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray shakes hands at a Lorain County Labor Day Festival. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

It’s not clear whether this conventional stick-to-the-issues approach will help their party win back some of the working-class voters who were known as Reagan Democrats back in the 1980s, and who now sound off regularly in journalistic explorations of Trump country. Ohio was trending red even before Trump; Brown and Obama are the only Democrats who have won statewide elections here in the past decade. Republicans dominate the state Legislature as well, and their older white base has been much more reliable about midterm turnout than the minorities and millennials who tend to vote Democratic. Republican candidates should also benefit from a strong economy that’s been growing for nine years, even though wages remain stagnant. And while Trump has been far more accommodating to corporate America and Wall Street than he vowed to be as a candidate, he has continued his populist attacks on free trade, disrupting the status quo in ways that could please Ohio workers who see globalization as the enemy of U.S. manufacturing.

New Window Ohio’s Deciders in Their Own Words: Buckeye State voters over 50 have strong opinions about President Trump, the economy and the other political party. (CLICK TO OPEN)

Still, the laws of political gravity apply. The national landscape looks bleak for Republicans, and the Ohio GOP is divided between ardent fans of the president and more establishment-oriented supporters of Governor John Kasich, a potential 2020 primary challenger who recently skipped the state party convention after the president was booked to speak. Republicans have also been embroiled in scandals involving charter schools and payday lenders in Columbus, not to mention the indictments, plea deals and other embarrassing dramas dominating the news out of Washington. Meanwhile, the Democratic base seems unusually fired up to take out its frustrations at the polls. And after two years of Republicans catering primarily to their own base, Democrats are betting that more persuadable voters will reject what they’re framing as the GOP agenda of slashing high-end taxes, rolling back health and safety regulations, supporting industry-friendly judges, and repealing Obamacare—now that the alternative isn’t Hillary Clinton. What they don’t want is another personality contest domineered by a big-talking billionaire with a flair for attention and distraction, which is why the AFL-CIO’s 2018 get-serious message to its members, plastered all over Ohio’s union halls, is: “Issues Matter. Vote Union.”

The subtext of a lot of coverage of the white working class has been that issues don’t matter much, because Trump voters love Trump, no matter what he does or tweets. That’s true for many of them, but not all of them, which is why his approval rating has dipped to potential blue-wave levels. Al Stapleton, a 72-year-old retired Teamster from Brunswick, says he voted for Trump to kick corporate asses and drain the Washington swamp, only to see the president attack unions, dismantle Wall Street regulations and ignore the threat to his $3,000-a-month pension. “The guy talked a good game, and I’ll admit it, I got hornswoggled,” Stapleton said before Brown’s talk. “He doesn’t care about working people. We’re dirt under his feet.”

Voters don’t always fit into neat socioeconomic stereotypes. Several retirees who came to see Brown discuss their pensions in Cambridge were still fuming about Clinton’s breezy observation on a visit to Ohio that she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” But Don Cameron, a self-described Reagan Democrat wearing a camouflage United Mine Workers T-shirt, said he’s far more upset about Trump’s apathetic response to Hurricane Maria: “He said he did so much for Puerto Rico? What a joke!” Wharton, the blunt-spoken Vietnam vet, brought up Trump’s change-the-subject attacks on black athletes who kneel during the national anthem, then surprised me by siding with the protesters.

Top: At Gene's Barber Shop in Salem, Ohio, the talk of the day is Nike and Colin Kaepernick. Bottom: An Ohio man waters the flowers outside his house. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

“What gives that frigging draft dodger the right to criticize?” Wharton said. “Look, I’m a white man. But you know what? Too many of us are scared of minorities taking over this country.”

That probably explains the Trump surge in the Midwest better than any economic analysis. After all, the double-digit unemployment of the Great Recession was already a distant memory in 2016. Yes, the median wage in Ohio had been flat for nearly four decades, but the median wage for black workers had declined 25 percent, and they didn’t flock to Trump. In any case, Democrats don’t need every Trump voter here to renounce him in 2018; they just need some of them to vote for Democrats or stay home. Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to hold together the uneasy Trump coalition, which will be a significantly harder task if voters decide that the issues matter more than the circus in Washington.



***

I recently visited Youngstown, a city of abandoned steel mills often featured in investigations of the white working-class Trumpquake, to watch Mike DeWine promote his Ohio Prosperity Plan at a manufacturing firm called Taylor Winfield Technologies. The Republican candidate for governor was supposed to be meeting with local employers, not employees, so I was confused when a company representative announced he would talk to the media in front of a welder.

Once home to bustling factories and thriving industrial economies, a decade after the nation’s recession, life carries on in the heartland of northeastern Ohio. Click here.

The welder turned out to be a “coil-joining welder,” an orange 58-ton piece of custom equipment the size of a locomotive. It was one of the machines that Taylor Winfield produces to help steelmakers replace human welders.

Trump has made some outlandish promises to workers on his visits to Youngstown, pledging to bring back every one of the tens of thousands of steel jobs the area has lost, but his pitch has been unmistakably aimed toward workers, evoking the bygone days when a kid out of high school could get a job at a factory and spend a lifetime in the middle class. DeWine’s event felt like a throwback to the pre-Trump Republican Party that often aimed its message toward business owners, who tend to be more supportive of conservative economics, but less numerous than their employees. DeWine spent an hour listening to manufacturers complain how hard it is to find capable drug-free workers, and how the U.S. educational system is overly focused on steering children toward college rather than vocational training. An official from the local chamber of commerce, which offers free workplace drug-testing to its members, told DeWine, “We’d like to see drug testing in the schools at a much earlier age.” Skilled workers were mostly discussed as if they were a scarce raw material in the manufacturing process, too often adulterated by opioids. There was no mention of wages, pensions or health benefits for their families until the end, when one executive told DeWine that low taxes “have a huge impact on how much we can pay our people.”

DeWine is not a blustery rabble-rouser, or a swaggering celebrity, or anything else that could be considered Trump-like. He’s a conventional Republican, a diminutive, bespectacled, unassuming figure with the aura of a substitute teacher whose students get rowdy when he turns to the blackboard. But he can’t afford to alienate Trump’s base by running away from his party leader. When a local reporter asked him about the president’s dismissive response to the death of John McCain, with whom he served in the U.S. Senate before losing to Brown in 2006, he dodged the question and said he’d rather discuss his prosperity plan. I asked whether he felt awkward running as a Republican in the Trump era; he said he’s just focused on Ohio, and happy that Kasich and Trump can both agree he should be governor. DeWine also went out of his way to praise the president and Republican Congress for passing a huge tax cut for businesses, vowing to enact similar policies in Ohio.

“We’re going to double down on what the federal government did,” he said.

Trump's name and campaign slogan are painted on the side of an Ohio barn. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

The next day, I watched Cordray address a food workers union in Columbus with a very different message: He’ll side with working people, labor unions and the middle class, while DeWine will side with the big oil companies, drug companies and chemical companies that fund his campaigns. The proof, Cordray said, was in their records; he recovered $2 billion for Ohio from financial behemoths like AIG and Fannie Mae as attorney general, then returned $12 billion from Wall Street scofflaws to swindled Americans at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By contrast, DeWine sued to repeal Obamacare and its protections for pre-existing conditions on his first day of work in 2011. Cordray didn’t dwell on Trump, but he did note that corruption probes are heating up in Washington as well as Columbus, and that “a certain non-Ohioan” has attacked his work for consumers.

“He thought it was terrible that I had worked so hard to get all that money back from businesses,” Cordray said. “I wear that criticism as a badge of honor.”

Cordray is not burdened by surplus charisma, either. He’s a nerdy former Supreme Court clerk and "Jeopardy!" champion who has embraced his reputation as a doppelganger for 30 Rock’s earnest Kenneth the Page. He tweets Ohio trivia and quirky musings about everything from odd fungus in his backyard to the aesthetically pleasing shape of the state. He’s not a natural politician, and when I followed him on the campaign trail, he was clearly happier zipping down the fun slide at a county fair and wolfing down dough balls called loukoumadesat at a Greek festival than mingling awkwardly with strangers. But while he doesn’t project lunch-bucket comfort at union halls, like Brown or his own running mate, former Congresswoman Betty Sutton, he’s running as a worker’s candidate, and the money he’s clawed back from Wall Street cheaters gives him populist credibility. Several Ohio union leaders told me Democrats are running their most authentically pro-labor slate ever, ideal for attracting crossover votes from blue-collar Trump backers.

“Rich looks like a banker, and if you want a motivational speech, he’s not your guy,” says state AFL-CIO President Tim Burga. “But people can tell he’s the real deal on our issues. And when people focus on our issues, we get to the right place.”

Some Ohio Democrats believe Trump could have expanded his blue-collar inroads in 2018 if he had kept his promises to launch a huge infrastructure program, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and vigorously attack the opioid crisis. He has done none of those things. Still, he has impressed some working-class voters by shaking up U.S. trade policies and picking fights with China, something Democratic and Republican presidents have been reluctant to do. His haphazard attacks on close allies like Canada have not yet produced much in the way of tangible results and there’s certainly no sign of a manufacturing renaissance in Ohio, but even some of his harshest Democratic critics admit that some voters give him credit for trying. “He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but at least he did something,” says Rep. Tim Ryan, a Youngstown-area Democrat who has been floated as a potential Trump challenger in 2020. But Brown and other Democrats have pointed out that the Republican tax bill actually included incentives for manufacturers to move jobs abroad, slicing their tax rates in half. And sure enough, General Motors recently announced a Chevrolet Blazer plant in Mexico on the same day it laid off hundreds of workers at its Chevrolet Cruze plant in Lordstown.

Top: Two retirees talk at a Teamsters meeting in a Knights of Columbus hall. The prevailing topic of discussion at the meeting is pension security. Bottom left: A motorcyclist outside of Ross' Eatery and Pub in Warren, Ohio. Bottom right: Pro-union stickers line a mirror at Ross' Eatery and Pub, which is located near a General Motors factory. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

“It’s a kick in the gut,” says David Green, the head of the United Auto Workers local in Lordstown. “Trump flipped this county from blue to red because he said he’d stop this kind of thing. Now he’s just like, hey, fake news!”

Trump campaigned as an unorthodox populist, but he and his Republican allies in Congress have mostly governed as standard corporatists, almost always siding with businesses over workers and consumers. They’ve relaxed regulations designed to prevent for-profit schools, financial advisers and predatory lenders from exploiting customers. They’ve saved corporations and pass-through firms $3.7 trillion on their taxes, and enacted additional breaks for heirs of billionaires and executives who buy jets. They’ve also made it easier for internet providers to sell customer data, oil conglomerates to conceal foreign bribes and mining companies to bury streams. It’s all consistent with conservative beliefs in limited government and supply-side economics, but very few of the details are populist or popular.

Democrats believe the Republican push to scrap Obamacare—especially its ban on discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions and its expansion of Medicaid for struggling workers—is their most politically explosive issue. Health care was the top priority of voters in the POLITICO/AARP poll, with 78 percent calling it “very important” to their vote, and only 39 percent approving of the way Trump has handled it.

Betsy Rader, a former Cleveland Clinic attorney who helped implement the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration, decided to challenge Rep. David Joyce in a northeast Ohio district after he voted 31 times for repeal. Since then, Joyce has voted no on repeal once House GOP leaders had the votes to pass it without him, scrubbed a boast that he had “fought to repeal and defund Obamacare every chance he’s had” from his website, and even highlighted his no vote in an ad distancing himself from Trump. In a district the president won by 11 points, Rader sees Joyce’s moderation as a clear sign of a new climate; the statewide equivalent is DeWine’s recent assurances that he plans to leave Kasich’s Medicaid expansion in place even though his own anti-Obamacare lawsuits would have scuttled it.

“Some Republicans are trying to tap dance back to the center,” Rader says. “But sorry, you don’t get to run on saving health care. People see what’s going on.”

Top: A woman walks her dog at a classic car fair. Bottom: A man inspects a line of tractors at the Canfield County Fair. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

This has become an article of faith for many Democrats, that voters will see what’s really going on—that auto plants and steel mills and coal plants aren’t roaring back to life, North Korea isn’t dismantling its nukes, health premiums and drug prices are still rising, and Republicans intend to get rid of Obamacare, Wall Street regulations and the Russia investigation if they hold onto Congress. “People will only ignore the evidence of their own eyes for so long,” Rader says.

Of course, that’s what Hillary Clinton thought when she held a triumphant rally with Beyoncé and Jay-Z in Cleveland a few days before the 2016 election. But Trump’s promises to Make America Great Again resonated here with voters who didn’t know Jay-Z from tai chi, voters who wanted a change from politics as usual. And whatever one thinks of Trump’s chaotic reality show, they did get change.



***

Trump famously declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But among the covered bridges, farm fields and plastics factories of Ashtabula County, a historically Democratic territory that Obama won twice before Trump cruised by 19 points, victory feels elusive. Trump’s tariffs have not yet provided any noticeable adrenaline for the area’s dwindling manufacturing base, while Chinese retaliation has already depressed soybean prices about 20 percent. So Jim Renacci, the Republican businessman-turned-congressman who is running against Brown, recently came to a soybean farm here in the rural town of Orwell to meet with the local agricultural community. His first request to the few dozen farmers who came to see him was for a show of hands: “Anyone here who doesn’t like the tariffs?”

No hands were raised.

“I may lose my farm over this, but I trust the president,” said Tom Yuhasz, a 62-year-old Republican with 5,000 acres of corn and soybeans. “He’s got a strategy. He was willing to sacrifice to run for office, and we’re willing to sacrifice, too.”





Upper left: The General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, is home to the Chevy Cruze. Upper right: A working-class neighborhood in Canton. Bottom left: The old Hoover Plant in North Canton now houses condominiums. Bottom right: The Union Metal plant in Canton was among the assets recently purchased by a private equity firm. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

While DeWine is trying to walk a delicate tightrope between Kasich’s classic Republicanism and Trump’s rebel yell, Renacci has gone full MAGA. He initially ran for governor, bashing DeWine as a “Columbus fat cat,” before the White House recruited him to seek Brown’s seat instead. I asked him how he was navigating the rift in the party, and he suggested that the president is the Republican quarterback, and Kasich ought to be helping the team: “Sometimes, you can throw a block, you know?” Renacci emphasizes that he grew up in a working-class family in western Pennsylvania, worked as a truck driver and a mechanic to get through college, then became a serial entrepreneur who ran nursing homes and auto dealerships. But while one aide described him as a cross between Joe Biden and Mitt Romney, and he actually looks like a cross between Joe Biden and Mitt Romney, his political instincts are quite conventionally conservative. And he’s especially thrilled with Trump’s conventional conservative agenda on taxes, regulations and judges.

“Some people might not like this president, but you’ve got to love his policies,” Renacci told the farmers.

There was definitely a lot of love in this barn, where a Trump 2020 banner (Keep America Great) rippled in the rafters. But Renacci wouldn’t be lagging so much behind Brown if the broader public felt the same way. And even with this committed Republican crowd, Renacci’s philosophical pitch for limited government fell a bit flat with voters who are more interested in limiting government for other people. When a GOP county commissioner asked Renacci how he plans to support programs for recovering addicts like her son, he responded with a principled but tone-deaf riff about how the real epidemic is government spending. “For everyone who says we need money for opioids, someone else wants money for cancer,” he said. “There’s only so much money!” One farmer asked why we couldn’t just fund treatment by getting rid of foreign aid, so he explained, accurately if not expediently, that the vast majority of federal outlays go to defense and entitlements, so wiping out modest discretionary items like foreign aid wouldn’t address the problem in any meaningful way. “I know people will say: ‘See, he wants to cut Medicare and Social Security,’” said Renacci, who does in fact support means-testing those programs and perhaps raising the retirement age. “I just want them to be sustainable.”

Trump has resisted Republican calls to reform entitlements for the elderly, although he did push deep cuts to Medicaid and disability insurance for the poor. The other domestic policy area where he’s rejected unpopular GOP orthodoxies is trade, which has created quandaries for market-oriented Republicans like Renacci. He’s voted for free-trade deals in the past, but he’s now backing Trump’s manufacturing tariffs and echoing Trump’s rhetoric about fairer trade. His problem is that Brown, author of a book called The Myths of Free Trade, is already the Senate’s most outspoken advocate of fairer trade. After the General Motors layoffs at Lordstown, Brown quickly proposed legislation to replace the Republican tax breaks for corporate outsourcers with a $3,500 tax credit for American-made cars. And while he’s opposed almost everything else the Trump administration has done, Brown has worked closely on tariff issues with Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, who is himself a native of Ashtabula County. If Renacci somehow beats Brown, it won’t be by outflanking him on protectionist populism.

Top: A man with a t-shirt reading "don't be a snowflake" stands outside the Republican Party's tent at the Canfield County Fair. Bottom: Inside, the party tells Trump 2020 paraphernalia. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

Trump won 17 of the Ohio counties that Brown won in his last campaign, which Renacci’s team cites as evidence of Brown’s vulnerability to a Trump-backed challenge. But Brown’s team cites that same statistic as evidence of his appeal to Trump voters. Rich Rankin, the top United Auto Workers official in Ohio, told me he recently saw 15 high school friends for their fantasy football draft, and while 11 of them supported Trump, all 15 support Brown. They know Brown as the rumpled guy who drives a Jeep Cherokee made in Toledo, buys ill-fitting suits made a few miles from his home outside Cleveland, and talks incessantly about respecting the dignity of work, whether it’s in a diner or a factory or a pharmacy. Even GOP operatives in Ohio privately acknowledge that Brown has built a solid brand as a fighter for the ordinary workers, and he believes that in the Trump era, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Republican Party fights for their bosses.

“If you take out trade, it’s a typical far-right corporate agenda—for privatizing prisons and schools, against protecting your pension and insurance,” Brown told me. “When people pay attention to that agenda, they don’t like it.”



***

Butch Lewis had 32 knee operations after he was wounded in Vietnam. He still managed to drive a truck for 40 years, and he survived cancer and mini-strokes to make it to retirement. “He loved being retired,” recalled his widow, Rita, who still works for a police department outside Cincinnati. “He treated me like a queen. He had worked so hard so we could enjoy those years.” Then one day, Lewis got a letter from the Central States Pension Fund, informing him that his $3,800-a-month pension would be cut in half. “The color drained from his face,” Rita told me through tears. “Six weeks later, he was dead. The stress over his pension killed him.”

The Central States multi-employer fund is expected to run out of cash in 2025, crippled by a combination of corporate greed, bad planning and way too many retirees relative to active Teamsters. A similar fund for mineworkers could go belly up by 2022. This is why Brown wrote the Butch Lewis Act, which would create a loan program to prop up the pension funds, so that workers who contributed for decades, often sacrificing short-term raises for long-term security, will get the payouts they were promised. Brown says he’s perfectly willing to compromise on the details of the plan, as long as the problem gets fixed and the retirees are made whole. But Republicans have been resistant. At Renacci’s event at the soybean farm, he asked Joyce to make a few remarks, and even though the issue hadn’t come up, the first thing Joyce said was that he couldn’t believe Teamsters were asking Washington to bail out their pensions. “There’s no money!” he said.

Top: At a roadside farmer's market, a couple of Cleveland Indians fans sell $2 hotdogs and $1 soda. Bottom: Members of the Columbiana Clippers football team run on field as head coach Bob Spaite watches. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

Rita Lewis voted for Trump, but she’s furious that he’s ignored this issue, especially now that he’s giving a $12 billion bailout to farmers hurt by his trade war. “We’re not asking for a bailout. We’re asking for what was promised!” she told me. “The Republicans keep telling us, oh, we have to think about the taxpayers. We’re taxpayers! If we didn’t have Sherrod working for us, I don’t know what we’d do.”

The issue of collapsing multi-employer pension funds barely affects 1 percent of American households. But as Democrats try to rebuild their brand—especially in industrial states where unions are still angry at Bill Clinton and Obama for pushing free-trade deals—it’s the kind of issue that can bolster the party’s credibility for defending working people. David Betras, the party chairman in the Youngstown area, wrote a memo to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in May 2016, warning Trump could beat her in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania if she didn’t show more respect for Americans who “run backhoes, dig ditches, and sling concrete block,” suggesting she run ads about the pension issue to show she cared about blue-collar workers. “They ignored me, and somehow, our voters went for the guy who shits on a gold-plated toilet,” Betras said. “When you’re thirsty, you’ll drink dirty water.”

Some of Trump’s older white working-class voters, particularly the ones angry about illegal immigrants and kneeling athletes, may be lost to the Democrats. But for all the attention they get, older white working-class voters are not the majority of the electorate. Only 12 percent of Ohio’s jobs are in manufacturing. Only 12 percent of its workers are unionized. The white share of the electorate is still 82 percent but falling. The state is changing; the mayor of Cuyahoga Falls told me he’s trying to revitalize his aging bedroom community to attract millennials who like avocado toast and craft beer. I watched Cordray speak at a gathering of some of the 45,000 Somali-Americans in the Columbus area, and get choked up telling the story of how a popular high school junior named Hamze Achmed befriended his clueless freshman son after they met in a history class. “Not everyone has such a welcoming an attitude,” Cordray said. “Did you see the ads attacking immigrants in the Republican primary? The idea that we categorize each other and shift blame on each other is so peculiarly un-American.” Incidentally, Achmed is now a senior at Ohio State, studying public policy with a focus on civic engagement, and he told me after the event that President Trump has done wonders to get his community excited about the midterms: “Come on, we’re black, we’re Muslims, and we’re immigrants; there’s no question we’re going to turn out.”

Democrats will need a dramatic improvement on their 2016 numbers to flip Ohio in November, and votes from newly registered Somalis will count just as much as votes from retired Teamsters angry about their pensions. Still, labor provides the party’s organizational muscle, and Democrats can’t win here unless union members come home. They already love Sherrod Brown, and at a Labor Day rally in Lorain, he stood in a denim shirt in front of Cordray and a slew of other Democratic candidates, trying to reassure the workers he fights for that his party will fight for them, too, urging them to focus on the issues and ignore the noise out of Washington.

“Health care is on the ballot,” he said. “Environmental policy is on the ballot. Labor rights are on the ballot. Progressive government brought you Medicare, Social Security and safe drinking water—and the Democrats behind me understand that.”

Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine

Brown is 65 years old, and he warned the crowd that three of four voters his age usually turn out in midterms, versus only one in five voters under 30. If Democrats can change that in November, he said, Democrats will win. The crowd went wild, and it sounded like he was done, but he had one more thing to say. He hadn’t mentioned Trump in his remarks—except to observe that he had just heard two presidents speak eloquently about statesmanship at McCain’s funeral, while “one president obviously wasn’t there”—but in politics these days, it always feels like the president is there. Maybe 2018 will be more about pocketbook issues than the elephant in the room, but 2020 will be about Trump. And while Brown has said he won’t run that race, it’s still on his mind.

“You know what’s next? The presidential race!” he roared. “And then we’re going to take this country in a whole new direction!”