Twelve years ago, Ohio Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown took the stage at an election night party in Columbus to celebrate winning a second term. Barack Obama carried Ohio for the second time after emphasizing that his administration had saved the auto industry. Brown wanted to trumpet the feat on stage, but he was losing his voice, so his wife, author Connie Schultz, replaced him.

With Jeep expanding its Toledo operations and General Motors building the Chevy Cruze at its revamped plant near Youngstown, Brown began chiming in to make sure the details were correct. “The aluminum was made in Cleveland…the transmission was made in Toledo…the engine was made in Defiance…the airbags were made in Brunswick.”

I thought about that moment often while on the campaign trail in Ohio this month. Brown is running for re-election. But the political landscape has changed a lot. Ohio is no longer a presidential battleground. GM is no longer closing the Lordstown plant where the Cruze is assembled in 2019. And Brown, who won his last two races by 5 and 7 points, is in a tight race against a car dealership boss named Bernie Moreno.

Brown and a dwindling group of Democrats in Ohio still advocate a certain kind of Democratic Party that cares about the working class, invests in its towns and factories, and values ​​the manufacturing jobs that power the nation. This case must have become easier to make lately. The Biden administration has supported major investments in renewable energy and computer chip manufacturing over the past four years; Two new Intel factories are being built near Columbus. But for Brown and the last remaining Ohio Democrats, the political environment is tougher than ever.

There are several possible explanations. Sixty percent of Ohio residents have only a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, or several years of college; This is a relatively high rate. Union membership has declined since its peak in 1989. It also took some time for Biden investments to increase.

At a Brown rally outside the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall in Dayton, David Cox, president of the local building trades council, told me his members were getting more work than they’d seen in 35 years. So why doesn’t this restore Democratic support among workers, I asked? “It takes a while for these guys to wake up,” Cox said.

But Democrats often overlook another dynamic at play here, and that’s the role of place: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town is struggling, you’ll believe it too. Some academics describe this in a sense as “common destinyand it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest where Brown and other Democrats are running, such as Reading and Erie in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Battle Creek in Michigan, Oshkosh and Racine in Wisconsin. to hold on to their seats and where Kamala Harris needs to succeed (or at least hold her own).

In 2007, academic Lorlene Hoyt and urban planning consultant André Leroux compiled a nationwide list of old and small “forgotten cities” with populations between 15,000 and 150,000 and median household incomes of less than $35,000. Recently urban researcher Michael Bloomberg updated this. Currently, 37 of the 179 cities on the list are located in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And Ohio leads the way with 23 cities.

Experts often overlook such places (they tend to focus on big blue cities, deep-red rural areas, and the suburbs in between), but given how clustered these smaller cities are in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they will be of great importance in the future. Battle for control of both the White House and Congress. Two Ohioans have gained particular prominence lately: Middletown (population 50,000), as the hometown of J.D. Vance, and Springfield (about 60,000), home to a large community of Haitian immigrants who have been targeted by the rhetoric of both Vance and Donald Trump.

I have visited dozens of these cities. There are beautiful city centres, often with stately central squares and ornate, century-old bank buildings rising 10 or 12 stories, but it can be difficult to find a cup of coffee after 2pm or a place to watch a game on television at night. The local news is full of articles like the ones I found in a newspaper in Lima, Ohio (pop. 35,000) a few weeks ago: a report that the area was getting its 12th Dollar General Store and a letter to the editor lamenting that store’s closing. A Dana Incorporated auto parts plant that employs 280 people. Equally disturbing, young people are becoming increasingly difficult to find; They’re more attracted to booming big cities like Columbus, which is sweeping up seekers from across the state.

For decades, these small cities leaned Democratic, but they’ve turned redder in the last decade. In 2012, Obama won Green Bay, Wisconsin, by a margin nearly twice as large as Joe Biden won in 2020; Obama won Saginaw by an extra 15 percentage points. Even in Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Obama’s lead was more than 4,000 votes.

What surprises liberals so much about this change is that many people who left the Democratic Party are doing well; these cities are full of small business owners, factory workers, and retirees receiving pensions under a Democratic president. But seeing your small city become a shadow of its former self can open you up to a harsh populist message, even if you’re running it yourself. “This is what academics mean.”shared destinyThis is what is missed when we analyze voting behavior solely by income, education level, or race.

Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who trained as an urban planner and is the longest-serving woman in Congressional history after more than 40 years in office, understands this inherent truth. Her mother was a union organizer at a spark plug factory and watched these wrenching changes spread from Toledo to the smaller cities she represented, such as Sandusky and Lorain.

It’s rare to hear him talk about the social issues that dominate discussions on the left. Instead, he insists, it’s about whether the nation’s industrial base can support its military, whether small cities have the expertise for economic development, whether workers at Toledo’s shuttered power plant can find new jobs. “I believe the economy is not destiny, but it is 85% of it,” he told me this month during a visit to his new steel mill at Cleveland-Cliffs in Toledo.

He has been fighting for years to get Democratic leaders to care about lagging districts like his. Hillary Clinton in 2018 boast He said the areas he carried in his 2016 loss produced two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product, as if votes from economically thriving areas were more important. Two years ago, Chuck Schumer, now the Senate majority leader, declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will elect two moderate Republicans from the Philadelphia suburbs. And you can replicate that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.”

That logic confuses Kaptur, who is currently in a close battle with state legislator Derek Merrin. “A country cannot survive when a large segment of your population cannot get ahead,” he told me. Last year, to impress on party leaders how much ground Democrats were losing in districts like his, his office compiled a table ranking 435 House districts by median income. Lesson learned: Democrats now represent most high-income areas like the Bay Area, the Northeast and the Washington metro, while Republicans dominate most low-income areas. His district, surrounded by red, ranked 341st. “Washington is having a hard time seeing us,” he said. “They need binoculars.”

For Brown, the plight of these small cities is personal because he comes from an archetypal city: Mansfield (pop. 48,000), which has lost a number of manufacturers. When I arrived at the central square this month, the first person I met was a woman asking for money. Brown’s father was a doctor, but as Brown often reminded voters, he went to school with the children of factory workers; It was a viewpoint that, like Kaptur, put him against trade agreements like NAFTA that many other Democrats supported.

“Politicians of both parties have awarded contracts to wealthy corporations and sold out the country over and over again,” he said this month at the United Auto Workers hall in Toledo.

After the event, I asked him about the challenges facing small cities. “These cities suffered more than metropolitan areas because young people tended to leave for lack of economic opportunity,” he said. “That’s why I pay special attention to them.”

On the campaign trail, that means making more visits to small cities than most other Democrats might. These cities also feature prominently in Brown’s stump rhetoric. “I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a town that’s a lot like Springfield, a lot like Zanesville, a lot like Hamilton or Middletown,” Brown said outside the union hall in Dayton, also a city. The “forgotten” list has been updated. After this incident, he engaged in a long conversation with a new kind of small-town leader: a pioneer of the Haitian community in Springfield, who now owns five homes there and had come to Dayton to see Brown speak.

No doubt Brown and Kaptur’s understanding of such places helped them survive as long as the state turned red. It’s not as if their rivals have offered these smaller cities many concrete solutions of their own. Far from it: Moreno’s ads focus on Trump’s support, and nearly all of the tens of millions of dollars in attack ads run against Brown by outside groups focus on transgender youth.

There’s a painful irony in this for Democrats like Brown and Kaptur. For years they have been urging their party to pay more attention to these scattered outposts of their base: Mansfield and Middletown, Springfield and Sandusky, all across the state and territory. They were largely correct in their warnings about trade policy and political consequences, and in the last few years there has finally been a national Democratic response.

But in many places demoralization had spread so widely and local institutions so weakened that it became much easier to register a message of dissent based on nationwide culture war calls. Brown is now as vulnerable as ever – She is only 4 points ahead of Harris in the latest poll — and Kaptur’s race is just as competitive. This is doubly painful for them because over the years they have largely avoided the culture-war front and focused instead on economic issues.

Brown and Kaptur can easily survive recent challenges. But it’s hard to see how Democrats can revive their standing in Ohio or boost their prospects in nearby swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania without helping revitalize those smaller cities. As Kaptur put it simply to me while sitting in his Toledo office overlooking the Maumee River: “They need to be seen.”