Basically, the GOP has given up on places like Weirton and Youngstown because they recognize that these places can’t be fixed. As one guy from the area told me several years ago: “The industrial base in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania and the West Virginia panhandle wasn’t decimated by ‘globalism.’ It simply got old and outdated, and then it was moved to places like Arkansas and Texas.”
He used Middletown, in western Ohio, as an example of everything that’s wrong across much of the Rust Belt. That town once had (and may still have) a reputation as the fentanyl capital of the U.S., with all the hallmarks of a fading Rust Belt town. And yet if you go just a few miles away into eastern Indiana you will find thriving towns with growing industries that support plenty of blue-collar jobs. As this guy admitted with great disappointment: “These industrial towns are dying because Ohio and West Virginia and Pennsylvania are terrible states for manufacturing companies to do business.”
THAT says it all, “These industrial towns are dying because Ohio and West Virginia and Pennsylvania are terrible states for manufacturing companies to do business.”
One piece missing is that these areas are Staunch DEMOCRAT and Heavily Unionized. They STILL VOTE HEAVILY DEMOCRAT today.
YOU CAN’T FIX GENERATIONAL STUPID!!!!
I agree. There is some truth to that. The heavily unionized states with an aggressive regulatory regimen are doing big damage. But I do think un-tariffed and even tax-credit encouraged globalism is a huge part of the destruction and the GOP simply does not care.