Donald Trump held a rally on Monday in Youngstown, the eastern Ohio town that has come to symbolize postindustrial Rust Belt decline. It didn’t go well: Trump mumbled about GOP Senator Jon Husted’s “ass” to a sparsely filled arena. But in Trump’s head, the event was a triumph that gave Husted a huge boost. As Trump subsequently claimed: “I heard he went up nine points.”
News flash: That didn’t happen. But Trump has good reason to pretend it did. Mahoning County, whose seat is Youngstown, has taken on immense significance for the political classes. Ever since Trump in 2016 began transforming the broader Mahoning Valley region into a GOP stronghold, Youngstown and Mahoning County have become a benchmark for reporters to interpret Trump’s inroads with the Midwestern working class. The constant media visits to Mahoning helped launch the meme of the “Trump diner safari.”
But numerous Democrats tell me they’re cautiously optimistic that they might flip Mahoning County once again. Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton—who are running for Senate and governor—are both heavily competing in the region, and both have profiles well suited to winning it back. If even one of them pulls this off, it will constitute yet another potent sign of Trumpism’s decline.
New internal data from Democrats helps explain this cautious optimism. Veteran Democratic pollster Margie Omero just did polling on Trump in the three counties that make up the broader Youngstown media market—Mahoning, Trumbull, and Columbiana counties. Omero found that Trump’s favorable rating in them is 11 points underwater, at 43–54. The poll, which came out of the field this week, was conducted for national Democrats, and it’s helping fuel their optimism.
“Trump is unpopular in this region because he’s broken his promises to make things more affordable,” Omero told me. “And people are really struggling here.”
The finding is striking. Trump won Mahoning, Trumbull, and Columbiana counties in 2024 by nine, 17, and 49 points, respectively. The latter is not flippable for Democrats, but Mahoning definitely is (Trumbull might be, but only on a very good night). Trump being that underwater in the whole region is quite a surprise.
Flipping Mahoning County would be big. When Brown lost reelection to the Senate in 2024, he fell short there by less than a point, and in Trumbull by six points. Brown—who has built his political identity around the working class—has devoted lots of time to the region, recently talking to Mahoning residents about rail safety and corporate CEOs screwing over workers.
Indeed, Brown works particularly hard to appeal to the sort of blue-collar workers who are not culturally or ideologically wedded to MAGA—people who were previously Democrats and presumably could be again. As Brown recently told writer John Judis: “Democrats don’t talk to workers enough, and don’t listen to workers enough.”
Acton, meanwhile, is running for governor as a daughter of Mahoning Valley. Acton—the state’s Department of Health inspector—grew up in Youngstown. She often talks about her difficult childhood in the region with her single mother. She went to high school in Trumbull County, where she was homecoming queen. As a candidate, she has visited the region 25 times, according to her campaign, and regularly describes herself as a “product of Youngstown.”
By contrast, the GOP candidates are imperfect fits for the region. Husted is a cookie-cutter pro-corporate Republican who was appointed by Governor Mike DeWine to the Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. Brown has savaged him for offering giveaways during his stint as lieutenant governor to facilitate data center construction, an attack that Republicans admit is landing. And while GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramasawamy grew up in Cincinnati, he’s a biotech financier—not a popular profession these days in working-class Ohio.
Both races are razor-close, and the Republicans could win one or both, particularly if the polling is off. And not everything is going Democrats’ way here. Republican Mike Rulli will likely win easily in the 6th congressional district. But right now Brown and Acton are overperforming: In polling averages, both lead by around four points in a state Trump carried by double digits. And their competitiveness in Mahoning is plainly a reason why.
Marty Loney, a senior official with two union locals in the Mahoning Valley region—one representing construction workers, the other plumbers and pipe fitters—estimates that around half the members in both locals backed Trump in the past. Trump’s inroads among unionized workers aided his success in the Rust Belt, but Loney says he’s seen serious erosion in these workers’ support for Trump since.
“They’ve been disheartened by the empty promises,” Loney told me. Speaking about Brown and Acton, Loney added: “I expect them to win Mahoning County, even though it’s going to be very close.” This could also be aided if working-class voters disillusioned with Trump stay home, which other regional union officials see as likely.
Mahoning’s broader trajectory tells a big part of the story of Trump-era America writ large. Barack Obama won Mahoning County by 28 points in 2012, yet Trump erased that advantage entirely in 2016, pulling even with Hillary Clinton there, then narrowly winning it in 2020 and winning it lopsidedly in 2024. That jarring swing helped turn Mahoning into a journalistic archetype of the Obama-Trump county—a lens through which to understand blue-collar abandonment of Democrats in the Rust Belt.
The white working class’s Republican turn, of course, goes back decades and involves much larger forces. One is deindustrialization, which hit the Mahoning region so famously hard that Bruce Springsteen captured it in the tune “Youngstown,” with its great line about “smokestacks reaching like the arms of God.” In a kind of perfect subplot, Trump now hates Springsteen for telling the truth about his betrayal of working people.
It’s fitting, then, that Mahoning County is where Trump went in 2017 and shouted to a crowd, “Don’t sell your houses,” because he’d bring manufacturing roaring back. It’s also where General Motors closed its Lordstown plant in 2019, devastating many residents. That didn’t stop Trump from winning there in 2020 and 2024, but the broken promises finally appear poised to catch up with him, even in this epicenter of Trumpian success in the industrial Midwest.
Mahoning County has long been lionized as the locus point of Trump’s successful exploitation of angst over deindustrialization. Yet Mahoning is also a place where his promises imploded with unusual force, revealing Trumponomics to be a hollow scam. And so, if the region votes accordingly in two weeks, it will become a fitting coda to that very big story—a journalistic touchstone for the sunsetting of Trumpism itself.