BOARDMAN, Ohio — The phone on the reception desk at the Mahoning County Republican Party headquarters rang again, and Henry Nickel picked it up. He listened, then answered the caller’s questions one at a time: “We have plenty of signs. … We’ll be open till 9 o’clock tonight. … Signs are free. … Put them up in your yard. … Okay. God bless.”
He hung up, and it rang again. Yard signs were stacked against walls and spilled across tables as volunteers arrived to collect them. But most of the callers wanted something the office did not have: a ticket to get into the Covelli Centre in downtown Youngstown on Columbus Day, when President Donald Trump came to ask the Mahoning Valley to carry Republicans one more time.
For much of the past century, the steel towns of this valley — Mahoning, Trumbull, Stark and Columbiana counties — were where Ohio Democrats banked their margins. Trump unmoored that hold in 2016. Now Republicans cannot win the state without the valley’s working-class voters. With polls showing competitive Senate and governor’s races, this corner of northeast Ohio will have an outsize impact in deciding who wins both.
A recent New York Times-Siena University poll found former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown leading Republican Sen. Jon Husted 49 percent to 46 percent. The same pollster has Democrat Amy Acton, former director of the Ohio Department of Health, leading Republican Vivek Ramaswamy 49 to 45 for governor.
It all comes down to whether these conservative populists show up — and for which candidate.
Nickel is not who many people would expect to find behind a Republican front desk in a Youngstown suburb. He is gay. His husband came to the United States from El Salvador and was undocumented when they met 18 years ago. They married in 2013. Nickel is a fifth-generation Californian and a former member of the San Bernardino City Council. And he got to Ohio in his own plane.
“My husband and I piled in our little four-seat airplane and took off and pointed to the Northeast,” he said. “He’s probably more conservative than I am. And he loves Ohio. The first time he came here, he said, ‘This is what I dreamed of as a kid when I thought of America, these tree-lined streets and just picket fences.’”
While knocking on roughly 800 doors for a political action committee across the valley, Nickel kept hearing Republicans say they would vote but would not say for whom — for Senate or governor.
“We have a real problem,” he said. “There’s an enthusiasm problem, especially for those that are at the top of the ticket.”
Nickel said that Husted, who was appointed to the Senate in 2025, doesn’t fire up the base, but he’s “a good guy.” When Republicans tell him they don’t want to vote for the senator, Nickel has a ready answer: “Then you’re voting for Brown.”
His view of the other party was blunt. “This is a Bolshevik-captured party now,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the true Democratic Party. And I honestly believe we need two good parties in this country.”
Then the door opened, and Tom McCabe walked in. McCabe chairs the county Republican Party and is the director of the Mahoning County Board of Elections. He is not worried.
“We’re still seeing that same level of excitement,” he said. More than 350 people turned out for Ramaswamy at the Canfield Fair, and the first 10 4-by-8-foot Husted signs went in a week.
“Trump turned this county red,” McCabe said. Republicans have won here without him, too. In Ohio’s 2022 Senate race, JD Vance carried Mahoning County by about three points over Tim Ryan, the valley’s longtime congressman. Still, McCabe concedes that voters are tired of high gas prices and the Iran war.
Paul Sracic, a retired political science professor at Youngstown State University, said the Mahoning Valley used to be reliably dark blue. “Labor unions brought the Democratic Party to the area through the steel mills, and through the years, people inherited the affiliation,” he said. “Even judges had to be affiliated with the Democrats to have any hope of being elected.”
The valley was so reliable, he said, “that Republicans used to only aim for about 35 percent of the vote as the best they could hope to do.”
Then came 2016.
“Suddenly Trumbull County voted for the GOP candidate, Donald Trump,” Sracic said. “Trump also almost won Mahoning County. Overnight the counties went from deep blue to red. … Trump was the difference. Since he wasn’t a traditional Republican, these ancestral Democrats felt comfortable voting for him.”
By 2024, Trump carried Mahoning County by roughly nine points; Barack Obama won it by about 28 in 2012.
Nickel sees the results every day. “A lot of the people that come in here and volunteer, they were all Democrats,” he said.
Austintown resident Ron Moore Jr., a local GOP committee member who came in for more yard signs, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2004 and has two stimulators implanted in his brain. He said you have to be more stubborn than your diagnosis.
He has been a lifelong Republican despite the objections of his mother’s family, who were all strong Democrats. Early voting is ongoing in Ohio, and Moore voted “straight Republican, straight down.” He credited Trump’s drug-pricing deal with cutting his monthly co-pays from as much as $3,200 to under $100. “I thank President Trump for that,” he said.
“As Ohio goes, so goes the nation” was more than a slogan. From 1964 through 2016, every presidential candidate who carried the state won the White House, the longest such run of any state. Ohio worked as a national sample: three big cities, none dominant, plus farm counties, suburbs and factory towns such as Youngstown, with no single industry in charge. Kyle Kondik, author of “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President,” wrote that its population has been described as “a microcosm of the whole country.”
The presidential prediction streak ended in 2020, when Trump carried Ohio by eight points but still lost to Joe Biden.
Yet the state Trump has now won three times is leaning the other way. A late-September Marist poll of registered voters found Brown ahead of Husted 51 percent to 43, and Acton ahead of Ramaswamy 50 to 44. In the same poll, Trump’s approval in Ohio stood at 42 percent, and 41 percent of voters said their finances had gotten worse in the past year. Ohio may no longer predict presidents, but its midterm voters still answer to their paychecks.
Sracic sees weak spots in all four candidates.
He said that Husted, a former Ohio House speaker, is not well-known outside of Columbus. “He is not really seen as a MAGA Republican,” Sracic said.
Brown used to win Mahoning Valley votes by opposing free trade. “He can’t own that position anymore,” Sracic said, “so what does he run on?” Sracic referred to Brown’s 2019 support for the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which marked a monumental shift in his political career. Still, he “may seem to be a safe Democrat for working-class voters who are disillusioned with Trump.”
Ramaswamy has “never served in any state or federal office, and that’s unheard of for a GOP gubernatorial candidate,” Sracic said. “He comes off as arrogant to some voters.” Acton, meanwhile, lacks the political skills to sell a good life story, he said. “She’s also, rightly or wrongly, connected to the covid shutdowns that many voters are still mad about,” he said of Acton signing the 2020 orders that closed Ohio’s schools and kept residents at home. She has declined to debate Ramaswamy, whom she calls a “chronic liar.”
Voters statewide don’t seem to be debating too much about whether unemployment is a defining issue. Ohio’s jobless rate fell to a record 3.3 percent in August. In the valley, unemployment is another story. In August, Trumbull County’s unemployment rate was 5.1 percent, the highest of Ohio’s 88 counties, and Mahoning’s was 5 percent, the second highest. Manufacturing, Ohio’s largest private industry, employed about 687,000 people in 2023 and accounted for 16.5 percent of the state’s gross domestic product in 2024. But the sector shed 2,700 jobs from March 2025 to March 2026.
Driven by global supply shocks, skyrocketing diesel and fertilizer costs are hurting Ohio agricultural producers. The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates that most major row crops won’t be profitable this year.
On the other side of the county’s political divide, at the Cornersburg shopping center, is Chris Anderson, 38, who grew up in nearby Hubbard and has chaired the Mahoning County Democratic Party for five years. He is unsparing about the president.
“Folks got conned by a con man,” he said. “There’s probably no place in the country that’s been used as more of a political prop by Donald Trump and his cronies than Mahoning County.”
At a Youngstown rally in 2017, Trump told the crowd that manufacturing jobs were returning. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he said.
“We lost manufacturing plants,” Anderson said, “and then shortly thereafter, GM closed Lordstown.” General Motors blamed slumping sales of the Chevy Cruze, the only car the plant built. Now, Anderson said, voters are “paying exponentially more for things that they were promised that they would pay less for.” Gas is still “damn near $4 a gallon,” he said, even after the Republican-led legislature this month suspended the state’s 38.5-cent gas tax for 90 days.
“The best way to protest Donald Trump coming,” he said, “is to go vote.”
Yet Anderson is nearly as blunt about his own party in Washington. He said as plants closed and young people left, many who stayed had enough of what national Democrats were selling.
“The issues that Democrats have had in Mahoning County are largely driven by the people’s animus towards the national Democratic Party,” he said. Brown and local Democrats ran campaigns that connected with local voters, while the top of the ticket relied on a national message that did not.
Unlike Sracic, Anderson thinks the valley still remembers Brown’s trade fights. “They know that NAFTA screwed them over in some capacity,” he said. “And there was no more vocal opponent to NAFTA than Sherrod Brown.”
If November goes his way, Anderson hopes Washington learns a lesson: “You have to give local organizations and state organizations the ability to talk to their own voters, not try and dictate a message that only resonates in big cities.”
Democrats once needed the Mahoning Valley to win Ohio. Now Republicans do. Whether Trump’s converts show up without his name on the ballot may decide both big races.
Back at the Mahoning Republicans’ front desk, Nickel had no doubt where the election would be won.
“I think this is the key to the castle right here, the key to the election,” he said. “We just got to keep the doors open.”
The phone rang again.
The post Ohio’s working-class voters are giving Republicans a reason to worry appeared first on Washington Post.
