Illinois and Rust Belt cities are not doing so well. Based on the big numbers coming south, there are few jobs up there. I left Chcagoland in 2013.
I consulted to Sears home office, 2 consulting trips. One was when the Brennan Brothers ran Sears and Wards. Brennan was also treasurer of the RNC representing IL and ran the IL GOP money.
Brennan lived in the 1950s in more way than one. Martinez followed Brennan. Then a long string of good top execs. Middle management refused to implement top management’s good ideas.
My team leader and team wanted to stock Levi and Lee jeans, shirts, etc direct from the supplier to the store. Levi and Lee wanted to do it that way. My CICS-DB2 system could reorder for each store in real time.
Middle management insisted or re-ordering from the Quarterly report which they got mid-month of the next Quarter. They were ordering Back-to-School replenishment in mid October when they needed to do it in mid-August when my realtime system could say what style was hot and what wasn’t.
I sat beside a young team that wanted and had coded and ready to install a Sears Catalog online, housed on the CLOUD known as ADVANTIS that Sears and IBM jointly owned. Sears middle management could not conceive of photos on the internet. They could only think of our 16 color character based dumb terminals.
Sears and IBM had no clue what to do with their CLOUD that had several big banks, other retailers, IT consulting firms, as well as the Sears family of Coldwell Banker, Allstate, Discover Card, Homart, etc. We coders loved it because we had open source COBOL and SQL between everyone on ADVANTIS. We could hop from consulting assignment to consulting assignment and be up to speed immediately.
Sears and IBM bought Prodigy as the same time, which was at that time bigger than AOL. They did not know what to do with it.
Middle management was motivated to maximize the size of middle management keeping chairs warm.
I keep hearing about problems in the Midwest, or Rustbelt, or some other place, but the polling figures are showing strong support for Trump in those areas.
I’m not quite as sure specific to the Rust Belt (because I don’t know exactly what the parameters are), but Trump isn’t languishing for support > IMO.
As for the comments you provided regarding poor leadership, it just baffles me to hear that. It’s obvious something along those lines had to be happening, but it’s downright painful to realize how out of touch those folks were.