Mahoning County: The Steel Valley blooms Republican
By Davy Vargo
Dressed in a white t-shirt, the 6-foot-1 man made his way to downtown Youngstown, ready for a Trump victory rally, never expecting what would happen later on the Tuesday evening in late July.
Earlier in the morning, the truck driver appeared on Fox & Friends. For 35 years, Geno DiFabio had been a registered Democrat. But now, he transitioned to a Republican and voted for candidate Donald Trump.
Then his phone rang. It was the White House: President Trump would like to meet him. “If this is real, yeah, I would,” he answered.
Around 6:30, Secret Service gave him instructions. Two photos with Trump, then you’re done. When Trump caught sight of him and came over, DeFabio remembers him saying, “There’s Geno. There’s my guy.”
The thrill of a lifetime, as DeFabio describes meeting Trump, might be the way many people in the traditionally Democratic Mahoning County would describe Trump’s election. Losing by just 3% in Mahoning County, Trump’s near-win toppled the Democratic bastion of Mahoning County and the surrounding area.
But David Betras, Mahoning County Democratic Party chair, wasn’t surprised. He believes that voters in the area were job-starved and didn’t much care to hear Democrats talk about bathrooms. Trump, on the other hand, appealed to the greedy, as Betras described the workers.
“He was rich, [and] he would make them rich,” Betras said about Trump’s persuasion. “Many people lost their jobs due to NAFTA.” Jobs, jobs, jobs were stressed by Trump, Betras said, so voters were pleased.
Eighteen of over 220 members in Democratic Party Central Committee in Mahoning Country turned red and voted Trump. Seeing these signs of unrest in Democratic ranks, Betras took action, sending a memo in May 2016 to the Hillary Clinton campaign. In it, he warned of impending loses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio and outlined a plan of action to save the Clinton campaign. “I know I am just a chairman but I am a chairman in the trenches,” he wrote.
He received no response.
Rocky DiGennaro, the business manager at Laborers’ Local 125, stayed loyal to the Democratic Party. Calling Trump a pawn man, the president of the Western Reserve Building Trades Council likened the President to a candidate for school council president who can’t deliver on promises.
“She still won,” he chuckled, maintaining Clinton’s narrow win in the county. The union employee thinks the Democrats need to remember again the working man, and the “do-nothing Congress” needs to change. Before any party, DiGennaro values being American, and befriends those of both parties.
Mahoning County was one of just eight Ohio counties that voted for Clinton. Normally, the county is an easy Democrat win (Obama won by almost 28 percent), with a strong union force in the Rust Belt industry area. But by 12 percent, Trump won union homes in Ohio, explains Statehouse News Bureau. With the media predicting a vastly different election outcome, many were shocked.
When he was asked to comment on the media’s misprediction, Mitch Davis, news director at WKBN in Youngstown, said he wasn’t interested in being part of this story. “Facts are facts, and stories are stories,” he said, stipulating that they followed the stories.
Mark Munroe, the Mahoning County Republican chairman, sees the media’s role in the election differently. He sat discussing the “Trump effect” at a long table in a room decorated with numerous elephants at the Mahoning County Republican Party headquarters.
“It’s really depressing to see what’s happened to the media—there does appear to be so much bias in the media,” Munroe said. “I wish the journalists would do a better job of focusing more on the facts and the news rather than on trying to advance their own personal agendas.”
Voicemails flooded the Republican Party’s office phone during the primary season with the same message: “I’ve been a Democrat all my life. What do I have to do to become a Republican?”
Munroe was stunned by the primary numbers. About 7,000 Democrats turned Republican, and about 20,000 previously unaffiliated voters chose red.
[pullquote align=”left”]“People have been betting against Donald Trump for a long time,” Munroe said. “They said that he couldn’t win the nomination. They said that he couldn’t win those primaries. Every time the conventional wisdom was that Trump couldn’t win, guess what happened? He won, and he won, and he won.”[/pullquote]
Geno DiFabio experienced what he saw as a stark contrast between his interviews with Fox News and CBS. With Fox, he had a good time. With CBS, he felt badgered.
After he met Trump at the rally, he was invited to go on stage. That night, he was wearing a white shirt with the words “Trump won” just visible above the podium, and below that, “Get over it” was inscribed. He had no idea he would be meeting the President, but he said the CBS producer pestered him about not wearing a suit to meet the President. “Did the campaign give you that shirt [to wear]?” DiFabio remembers the producer asking.
CNN and MSNBC called him for interviews, but he didn’t call back.
Since he drives trucks for an industrial repair shop in Youngstown, DiFabio talks to many people, and contrary to many predictions, they all said they were voting for Trump.
The pro-life and pro-Second Amendment former Democrat ad-libbed his remarks to the crowd of more than 15,000. The Rust-Belt description of area around Youngstown (a description born from the dying industries) doesn’t strike him as well as the more optimistic name the Steel Valley, which he mentioned in his remarks on stage.
He shook hands with the President, and walked off stage to chants of “Geno, Geno, Geno” from the crowd. Backstage, Kellyanne Conway, who DiFabio thinks is too skinny, hugged him and told him that the crowd was screaming his name. “I couldn’t hear or see them [the audience],” DiFabio said of his time on stage.
DiFabio enjoyed the spotlight, posing for unexpected photos with crowd members afterward, and he’s also enjoying what he considers positive changes in his area since Trump’s been elected. His job depends on coal-fired power plants, and he says restrictive regulations have been rolled back since Trump’s election.
UAW union member, poses in front of his GM truck. Courtesy of Dominic Humphries.
He criticized Sherrod Brown for not coming through on his promise to fight NAFTA. “Why would you treat people like that?” he asks of Democrats. But as for Trump? “I love the guy,” DiFabio said.
Dominic Humphries is a United Automobile Workers (UAW) union member who’s been laid off since January. T-shirts and bumperstickers indicate the majority of union members support Trump, the assembly line worker believes. “I educate people every day,” he said concerning his knowledge of past presidents and the country.
Humphries feels that General Motors has retaliated by laying off workers for their Trump vote. “We got punished for voting for Donald Trump,” he said.
Still, there is hope in the Steel Valley for the Trump voter.
When his Democrat friend told Humphries that he was voting for Trump, Humphries was shocked.
“I almost had a cardiac arrest.”
Still wondering how Donald Trump became President of the United States? We aren’t! Follow the linkhttps://t.co/UYW8TNLT5l…looms-republican/
— Ben Roesser (@ben_roesser) September 18, 2017
Curious how President Trump was able to win the swing state of Ohio…learn more here https://t.co/vfNs6qGIeH
— Anthony Calvaruso (@CalKentJMC) September 19, 2017
@JMCRPP Mahoning County is the Steel Valley, not the Rust Belt, Trump voter Geno DiFabio says. https://t.co/PFTvolZVGQ…looms-republican/
— Sam Madison (@sammadsion12) September 19, 2017
Text by Davy Vargo. Interactive content by Anthony Calvaruso. Video by Brianne Kocher.
