In Ohio, It's Really About the Economy

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Some houses in the Nuss family’s neighborhood have sat for years without selling Photography by Billy Delfs, Chart by Alberta Mena/BW

McGregor is leery of the candidates' “feel-good“ messages Billy Delfs

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Since 2000 the state has lost 236,000 manufacturing jobs, a 23.3% drop. One sign of the times: In 1995, General Motors (GM) was Ohio's largest private employer, with some 63,200 employees, while Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) was ranked No.6, with 15,100. Today the discount retailer is the state's top source of jobs with 52,000 workers. GM employs just 12,300.

Many Ohioans fear things could get worse. Steven Cochrane, senior managing director for Moody's Economy.com (MCO), says Ohio is already probably in recession, and new signs of trouble are popping up. Standing in a showroom loaded with brightly painted new Fusions and Escapes, R. Douglas Seibert, the executive vice-president and general manager of Columbus car dealer Graham Ford, doesn't need to consult a forecast to know a slowdown is hitting home. He's seen it in the thinning traffic to the dealership. A year or so ago he might have sold 200 cars a month. Now he's closer to 100. And most buyers these days are looking for used vehicles or fuel-efficient cars, which bring lower prices and far smaller margins than the big SUVs that used to be his bread and butter.

The growing woes have made many receptive to the anti-trade talk they're hearing from the Democratic contenders. Mansfield, an hour north of Columbus, used to be known as a place to go for a job; Whirlpool, Tappan, and a host of other manufacturers all had plants there. Now the hulking GM plant on the outskirts of town is the last of the big factories left. As snow piled up in the half-empty GM parking lot early one recent evening, Joe Toth, a production worker with 22 years on the job, fretted about the future. From a high of over 4,000, the plant has shrunk to around 1,700 workers, and a new round of buyouts is in the works. Toth, 45, is gripped by the stories he hears around town. The local rubber products company, Swan Hose, that offered employees just $100 severance for each year worked when it laid them off and transferred production to China. The GM worker who took a buyout in 2006—and is now about to lose his home to foreclosure. "Is this an anxious time? That's putting it politely," says Toth. "Stark fear is more like it."

Toth, a dyed-in-the wool Democrat who wants to see Nafta canceled, worries about how he would pay his bills, pare down his debt, and continue to care for his 84-year-old mother if he were to lose his job. He likes the candidates' focus on the economy: Issues like Iraq and terrorism are much further down his list of priorities. "You can have all the national defense you want, but what good is it if your middle class is crumbling around you?" he asks. While many of his fellow workers supported John Edwards and still don't know who to back, he's leaning toward Obama.

The housing crisis is also much on the minds of many Ohio voters: 3.72% of all the state's mortgages are in foreclosure, according to the Mortgage Bankers Assn. The overly aggressive lending practices seen elsewhere bear much of the blame, but the consequences have been compounded as many homeowners have lost their jobs or ended up in new ones at lower pay. Once-thriving working-class neighborhoods in Cleveland and other struggling industrial cities in the state's northeast have been particularly hard hit as house after house sits empty. Many sport "For Sale" signs—but a combination of vandalism, the surplus of properties on the market, and the lack of buyers has left them virtually unsalable.

If the problems started in the industrial cities, they've now spread to the middle-class exurban communities—sprawling expanses of newly built subdivisions that have sprouted around the state's major cities in the past decade or so. Just north of Columbus, Delaware County long boasted of being the state's fastest-growing region, as miles of cornfields were transformed into neighborhoods for an expanding cadre of white-collar workers in health care, government, and other service sectors.