CLEVELAND — Brook Park is a working-class suburb just west of Cleveland where the houses have petunias and American flags planted in the front yards and loyal union members living inside — people who have voted Democratic, almost reflexively, for generations.

Which may be why Dan Rivera answered “the Democrat” — but not “Clinton” — when asked who he is voting for in November.

“Trump’s a con man, he tells you what you want to hear,” Rivera, fresh off his early morning shift as a metal stamper, said of Republican nominee Donald Trump. While he’ll vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, he said with a shrug, “She should have known better about that email server.”

A few doors away, retired Teamsters trucker Don Sherwood has decided to back Trump, “because it’s time for a change. Hillary scares me. She seems like a mean wife. I just don’t like her demeanor. Anybody else would have gone to jail for what she did with that email.”

While the latest polls show Clinton pulling ahead in swing states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, she remains in a virtual dead heat in Ohio. That’s evidence of a visceral dislike many working-class and white voters have of her and of the kindred spirit they’ve incongruously found in Trump, the tough-talking New York developer. Animus toward the Democrat was expressed in misogynistic buttons selling briskly outside last month’s GOP convention in Cleveland that featured Clinton’s photo over the phrase: “Life’s a bitch: Don’t vote for one.”

The importance of winning Ohio is hard to overstate: Since 1944, Ohio voters have picked the victor in every presidential election but one — they preferred Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in 1960. About 60 percent of Ohio’s electorate doesn’t have a college degree, and while President Obama won the state in 2012, white voters overwhelmingly backed GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

With polls showing Trump receiving little support from African American and Latino voters, he needs to attract these voters overwhelmingly to win Ohio.

Some of Trump’s working-class supporters overlook the fact that his namesake coats and ties are produced overseas or that he’s stiffed local contractors who’ve worked on his building projects. The media blows those stories out of proportion, they say. They like Trump because, much like Bill Clinton in 1992, he feels their pain. And they take Trump at his word that he’ll “fix” trade deals they blame for sending many of Ohio’s manufacturing jobs overseas.

The question to ask in the coming weeks is how long Ohioans will continue to support Trump, considering his stumbles after the political conventions. His hard-core supporters may blame the media, but in veteran-heavy neighborhoods like Brook Park, where one family built a tribute to a son who died in combat in the shape of a grave site, his verbal attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Gold Star parents who criticized him at the Democratic National Convention, might wear thin.

“He can lose their support, but it may not go to Hillary — they may just not turn out,” said Paul Beck, a professor of political science at Ohio State University. “And Republicans are worried that if Trump is so toxic at the top of the ticket, it’s not that they might vote Democratic, it’s that they might not turn out at all for anybody.”

What’s helping to keep Trump afloat in Ohio, Beck said, is the strain of anti-Clintonism that’s partially rooted in the same cultural fears that turned many working-class whites against Obama in 2012.

Even though Obama’s support of an auto bailout helped preserve an industry that’s crucial to the state’s economy, he barely received as much of the state’s working-class white voter support (44 percent) as did Romney (46 percent), who opposed the bailout.

“These are people who strongly endorse the idea that America is on the wrong track,” Beck said. “Whites and religious white males feel like they are being left out, and there’s an aversion to Obama because of his race.

“Trump is this tough guy who is not politically correct — they really identify with him,” Beck said. “They feel that he is listening to them and giving voice to their frustration.”

Not to be forgotten, said David Sheagley, who has been canvassing door-to-door on behalf of Democrats in Cleveland’s working-class neighborhoods, “is how Hillary’s gender plays into this. A lot of men don’t want to vote for a woman who stands up and is a strong leader.”

The reasons longtime Democrats are backing Trump sound similar 74 miles southeast of Cleveland in the Youngstown area, a onetime steel powerhouse until production moved overseas the past three decades and devastated the region.

In the surrounding Mahoning County, Republican registration doubled in Ohio’s March 15 primary, as more than 6,000 Democrats switched parties to vote in the GOP primary. Only about 200 Mahoning County Republicans switched the other way.

Many say that they switched parties because Democrats haven’t done anything to lift stagnant wages. Trump may not be spelling out specific plans, but they’re attracted by his blustery promise of “fixing” those bad trade deals.

“I think that Trump is a breath of fresh air,” said Jessica Thompson, a 34-year-old Boardman Township resident who volunteered for Obama’s 2008 campaign when she lived in Tennessee and backed the president again in 2012. “I know that he pisses a lot of people off with some of the stuff he says, but some people appreciate that. It doesn’t sound like a canned script.

“I’ve never liked Hillary Clinton. She’s the epitome of the canned, rehearsed politician,” Thompson said. “I don’t even know if she knows how to be genuine.”

Leo Connelly is a lifetime Democrat and disabled Vietnam combat veteran who voted twice for Obama “after Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. But it’s got to the point now where somebody’s got to do something.”

“We’re robot voters in this area,” said Connelly, who advocates nationally for disabled vets. He said many locals are of the mind that “I’m a die-hard Democrat and God forbid that I go Republican.”

But Connelly switched because he’s dubious of Clinton, calling her “the biggest liar, corrupt. She said with her own words that she was damn near broke when she left the White House and now she’s worth $50 million (closer to $45 million, according to Forbes) — and you don’t own a business? How is that possible?”

That Trump is a businessman “who’s shown that he can do it” means more to Connelly than somebody with binders full of policy plans.

A few minutes drive from the Youngstown-area Republican headquarters, where Connelly was talking, leaders of the region’s building trades unions said at their weekly meeting that they are all on board with Clinton.

But, they conceded, some of the rank-and-file might not be. Some were Bernie (Sanders)-or-Busters who might eventually back the Democratic nominee. And some were supporting Trump.

“I think you’ve got people who don’t read anything, don’t think, and you’ve got a reality TV star who swooned them,” said Tony DiTommaso of the local carpenters union.

The union leaders shared no definitive opinion of why so many Youngstown-area Democrats had crossed over to vote Republican in the primary. Some did so to back Ohio Gov. John Kasich against Trump, feeling that the businessman would be the weaker candidate against Clinton in the November. Others said union members switched parties to back Trump against Kasich, who has supported several antiunion policies during his tenure as governor.

But despite that, union leaders feel many wayward working-class Democrats will return to the fold in November. The federal auto bailout Obama and his fellow Democrats backed helped many of the trade workers around Youngstown survive the recession.

“It was huge,” DiTommaso said.

Plus, Trump supports states that have “right-to-work” laws, which ban labor contracts that force workers to join a union or pay a fee. He has flip-flopped his position several times on raising the minimum wage, most recently saying that he supported raising the federal level from $7.25 to $10 an hour and letting states decide their own rates.

“I think they’ll come back in the fall if we can educate them,” said Jim Burgham of the electrical workers union. “He should be making it easy for us, with some of the comments he’s made. But he’s just playing on people’s fears. He finds out what you’re afraid of and he plays on those fears.”

Recent polls say Clinton has been able to overcome some of that fearmongering in an increasing number of swing states with high numbers of working-class voters, like Pennsylvania. But Ohio, with its history as the country’s bellwether, may be a more telling indicator if she’s really ended the fascination working-class voters have with Trump.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli

Online extras

Videos show Brook Park voters discussing their choices:

http://bit.ly/2aB4lGn

http://bit.ly/2aB7yWG

http://bit.ly/2aAmQtz