CANFIELD, OHIO — While a crucial federal election is happening here this year — the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Jim Renacci — many of the campaign signs you’ll see in these lawns, many of them homemade, bear the name Donald J. Trump.
Ohio is one of ten states Trump won in 2016 where a Democratic Senator is trying to retain his seat. Trump took the Buckeye State easily, and in theory is part of the expansive universe where Republicans could make historic gains.
But will they? The question looms large in Ohio where Brown has effectively tamped down his leftist politics and amped up his populist rhetoric — something that will help him win back Democrats from the Trump coalition to hold on to his seat.
That is if Brown can play just as well in downtown Columbus as he can in the Mahoning Valley.
Can Brown pull this off? Can a far-left liberal win in Trump Country?
Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University thinks Brown can do it. “He just might be the model of how you bring back straying Democrats into the fold not just for the midterms, but also for the 2020 presidential elections.” Scraic cited Brown’s stances on trade, which line up with Trump’s positions.
Polls so far show Brown with a comfortable lead over Renacci — both the Suffolk poll and Quinnipiac polls last week showed Brown way ahead.
Flush with money, Brown went up quickly with an ad saying “Jim Renacci has been a lobbyist even while in Congress.” (Here, Politifact makes the case that this is a mostly false attack.)
In a time when Trump and populism are considered bad words by the mainstream media, that’s not the story here. Renacci’s biggest drag won’t be Trump, but his difficulties raising money. Brown’s problem isn’t his populism, but how far left his party has gone on culture wars regarding God, guns, Hollywood, and the National Anthem.
The race in Ohio might depend on voters like Jim Sarene, the sort of invisible voter whom pollsters missed and who swung the 2016 election to Trump. Will Sarene come out again? I went out and asked him, but the first thing I learned about him was not to call him Jim. Why?
Everybody calls him Geege.
“When I was born my sister who was just learning how to talk said something that was similar to G-G, instead of Jimmy. And my mother thought, ‘Oh, how cute.’ So that was the name, it sort of started out like a girl’s name for me, GG and ended up becoming Geege,” he said.
Fifty-four years later Jim Sarene is still Geege to just about everyone he knows.
Sarene lives in Canfield a leafy suburb of Youngstown, Ohio in the Mahoning Valley that is strikingly different than the worn-out former industrial center a couple of miles away. There is a gazebo in the center of the town, there are zoning regulations requiring lawns to be well kept. Large signs are verboten and the homes are in good shape.
While Youngstown bleeds population, Canfield has seen growth: Between 1990 and 2000 the population grew by nearly 40 percent, but that growth skidded to a stop in 2010.
Mahoning County is deeply blue, or it was. Once known as the Steel Valley, it is located along the Pennsylvania state border. Every Democratic presidential candidate has won this county in every cycle for 60 years with the exception of George McGovern in 1972.
In stroke of brilliance, Trump visited the Canfield Fair in September 2016. The 170 year old staple is the largest county fair in the state and his appearance was vigorously welcomed by dislodged Democrats and weary Republicans who were looking for something different.
Despite being a traditional Labor Day campaign stop for any candidate running for president, Hillary Clinton for some inexplicable reason did not show up.
In her place then-Vice President Joe Biden was sent.
Trump did not win this county — but the shift in voter preference was seismic; Barack Obama won Mahoning County big in both 2008 and 2012 by about 30 points both times. Trump finished within 3 points of Hillary Clinton here, holding her under 50 percent.
“Trump did not make Mahoning blue but what he did was a remarkable swing red away from the Democratic Party,” said Sarene.
Jimmy Sarene has never voted in his life, “Nope. Never. I toyed with the idea of voting for Ross Perot back in the day, but I wasn’t motivated enough. I understood he wasn’t going to win. But then came Donald Trump.”
Sarene came from a working-class family in nearby Liberty, Ohio. “Dad drove a bread truck. Mom stayed home. It was a good life. My parents did not have a lot of money, so I put myself through college, took me a long time but I finished, paid for it myself,” he said.
Sarene married a local girl and they moved to Charlotte. “She said let’s check it out. There’s not much going on in Youngstown, and I said, ‘Okay.’ And we moved. She went to college there. Her father worked for a big company here called Commercial Sharing, which does piping. We met after she graduated from college,” he explained.
Two sons and a decade and a half later they are divorced; she lives in suburban Pittsburgh — he is in Canfield with his girlfriend who works at a high-end beauty salon.
“Everyone around here was a closet Trump voter, they didn’t want to admit it, because they were afraid of the way people would judge them; if you were a Democrat you got heat for supporting him, so did Republicans, so did women, so did people who were successful. So no one said anything,” he said.
Sarene has weathered the fickle economy with grit, he moved from Charlotte to Raleigh; when a company he worked for downsized, he reinvented himself.
“Every time a company was bought, or closed down, because of financing, or whatever, I would always outsource myself. I said, ‘Here it is again, survival of the fittest, making things happen, being creative, innovative.’ Finally I turned myself and my skills into my own business model.”
Five years later his biological sciences company is doing well, which gave him the ability to come back home.
“You know what? Youngstown’s very small, but it’s cozy now at this point in my life, it is perfect. It’s comfortable.”
“Years ago when I heard Trump speak, I never liked him. I thought, ‘What a schmuck. What a schmuck.’ But my perspective was different. Now, after I have gone through the trenches and come up and made my own business, I get him. And I looked up and understood that this is who should be president,” he said.
His interest in the election surprised his girlfriend, “You have to understand I have never voted for president before. Never watched the news with so much intensity either. I started watching Trump. My girlfriend and I, literally, we’d watch Game of Thrones, and we watched the news. She’s like, ‘isn’t there anything else you want to watch?’ I’m like, ‘No.’”
Nearly two years later not much has changed in his support and his viewing habits. But is he motivated to show up to vote in 2018 in the midterm elections and vote in the down ballot races for congress, governor and the U.S. Senate?
“Yes,” he says without hesitation, “And I am voting for Renacci.”
“I think it is important for the President to have the support in Congress and I am motivated to show up and give him that support and vote Renacci,” he said.
For Geege it is as simple as that.
