PARMA, Ohio — The Last Stop Inn isn’t an Inn. It’s a bar that looks like a barn on the edge of Parma’s business district. Parma is a Cleveland suburb, but it’s not a white-picket-fence place like another Cleveland suburb, Shaker Heights.
In Shaker Heights, the median household income is more than $75,000. In Parma, it’s less than $50,000. In Shaker Heights, 40 percent of adults over 25 have a graduate degree. In Parma, less than 20 percent have even a bachelor’s degree.
At the Last Stop Inn on Wednesday night, a customer looks for an old lost quarter on the floor because happy hour just ended and a bottle of bud has gone from two bucks to two-fifty. One customer just busts out his guitar and starts singing the X-rated version of “Rocky Raccoon.” Another regular tells how he used to grow pot on his balcony and make $400 a month selling it at the dive bar across the street. A one-star review of this place on Yelp objects that a barback there was open-carrying his handgun one night.
And everyone at the bar is white. It should be Trump territory.
But this is Ohio.
“Kasich’s my man,” says Fred from Parma sipping his Bud Light. “I like what he’s done for the state of Ohio.”
Fred is a retired Teamster — he used to deliver Little Debbies food products around the Cleveland area — and a lifelong Democrat who regrets his votes for Obama in 2008 and 2012. He’s no buttoned-up Kasich Republican.
“I thought we were doing pretty good before the NAFTA Act,” Fred says. In his retirement, he still has to work: “I deliver automobile rotors — made in China, made in China, made in China. … We should do it all ourself. We could make steel here.”
Fred’s immigration views also sound more Trump than Kasich: “You have people coming in from Mexico, who took our jobs. They probably shouldn’t even been here. Yeah, I agree with Trump on that.”
Fred has seen Ohio’s economy improve over the past six years, and he gives Kasich much of the credit. Lots of Ohioans do.
Kasich has a 79 percent approval rating in his home state, according to recent Fox News poll. It is telling that about 17 percent of likely voters in Ohio hold Kasich and Trump as their top two candidates.
While Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have concentrated on attacking Trump’s character and record, Kasich seems to be targeting Trump in another way: trying to win over his working-class supporters.
“If you think about the voters who are disaffected,” Kasich said at a town hall a few miles southwest of Parma, “some of these Trump supporters … they worry about this. … Is this going to be another lousy trade deal, and am I going to lose my job? Am I ever going to get a pay raise?”
Kasich, like a good husband, understands that the first step in addressing someone’s concerns is to express sympathy. “This anxiety is real,” Kasich said. “And I understand it. … That’s how I grew up. The wind could blow the wrong way, and you’re out of work. … I get all this.”
Then he delivered his promise: “We have to fix it in the country just like we fixed it here in the state.”
Not all Ohioans agree that Kasich fixed it.
“I don’t think nothing has changed,” Kirk tells me as we walk down Pearl Road in the rutty Cleveland neighborhood of Old Brooklyn. Kirk wears a bandana and sunglasses, and his arm is decorated in tattoos that include at least one skull. He’s employed at the Ohio Crankshaft Company, but he’s not economically secure. The company laid him off ten months ago and just hired him back, he tells me.
Stacy, accompanying Kirk into the Glass House smoke shop, drives Uber at night and works in home healthcare during the day. “The people I do home healthcare for — they’re struggling.”
Kirk says immigration is the most important issue. He feels that our system unfairly favors immigrants, denying opportunities to natives.
This is central to Trump’s appeal to the working class: Free trade and mass immigration are taking your jobs and cutting your wages, while enriching the corporate lobbyists; Trump will tell the lobbyists to buzz off and actually stand up for the working man.
How can Kasich compete with that?
“Fiscal sense, common sense regulation, and lower taxes,” Kasich said his Columbus reception after the Michigan primary results came in Tuesday night. He said basically the same thing in Cleveland that afternoon.
Is he serious? William Batchelder was the speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives for Kasich’s first term. He worked hand-in-hand with Kasich on deficit reduction, regulatory reform and tax cuts. Batchelder agreed with my sense that Kasich can win the working class with that message — especially in the face of Trump’s clanging nationalistic protectionism.
Kasich, in most states, is totally failing to connect with the working class. In neighboring Michigan, for instance, he scored only 16 percent of the vote among those who never went to college, according to exit polls. The only educational cohort Kasich won was those with graduate degrees.
It’s the same with income. Of the 70 percent of Michiganders who earn five figures, Kasich got only one in five voters, finishing third. He was the candidate of Shaker Heights.
Could Kasich’s record give him inroads to the working class in Ohio? Fred from Parma suggests as much, as do the polls showing him much higher in the Buckeye State than anywhere else.
Kasich’s outreach to the downtrodden — the addicted, the poor, the disabled, and minorities are all included in his stump speech — will win him some votes in Parma and Old Brooklyn. He’s also hoping Ohio’s recovery under his watch gives him something to offer blue-collar voters around the country. “Jobs, jobs, jobs, and more jobs,” Kasich said in one speech.
Kirk, before ducking into the smoke shop, shakes his head at this sort of talk. “Every time elections roll around, they promise you everything. Trump’s not promising nothing,” Kirk says with smile. “That’s why I like him.”
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
