“ The Republicans inherited them, but most of their strategists running messaging and campaigns had no idea what to do with them, at least on the national level.”
Republicans are just as bad as democrats. They are big time free traders and China lovers. And you might have noticed they fought Trump tooth and nail on the wall and China and the trans-pacific partnership.
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 It simply got old and outdated, and then it was moved to places like Arkansas and Texas.”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.”