BARBERTON: Brown leaves blew into piles as Terry Shaw took a stroll downtown on a slow business day.
Lately, most days are slow, said the 63-year-old owner of a one-man delivery company.
Shaw, a Republican. is rare in a city where Democrats dominate the council and conservatives don’t even put up candidates for mayor.
“I’m outnumbered like 4 to 1 in Barberton,” Shaw said Friday morning as the wind pushed up his college football hat with an “I Voted” sticker peeling at the edges. “That’s why I don’t put yard signs up — because I don’t want to be vandalized.”
In the next election, Shaw might be so emboldened to decorate his front lawn with his political preference. Why not? The Democratic city he calls home just elected a Republican president.
With late-arriving and provisional ballots yet to be tallied, Donald Trump squeaked out a 2 percentage point victory over Hillary Clinton in Barberton. Small as that margin may be, it was a huge feat. President Barack Obama trounced Mitt Romney there by 21 points in 2012.
The Beacon Journal analyzed the early results of Tuesday’s presidential election to determine how each of the communities in Summit and Stark counties voted, including turnout and candidate preference.
Some of the more jaw-dropping findings include the reliably Democratic Barberton, Mogadore, Lakemore and Tallmadge rejecting Clinton to elect Trump.
In the most reliably Republican corners of Summit County, where college degrees and $300,000 plus homes are common, voters moved away from Trump. His rhetoric unnerved the state’s most wealthy, educated and loyal Republicans. This helped Clinton do better than Obama in Hudson, Bath Township, Fairlawn, Copley Township, Silver Lake, North Canton and Jackson Township.
But the net result of the seismic electoral shift was obvious: Trump recaptured bellwether Stark County for Republicans and cut the Democrats’ margin of victory in Summit County in half.
Driving the political realignment were blue-collar and disenfranchised voters and otherwise dependable Democrats who stayed home. Turnout plunged where it counted most for Clinton — who proved to be less inspiring with minorities and millennials than Obama — and surged for Trump, who captivated rural and low-income communities that have tuned out of politics for decades.
Trump may have lost the popular vote to Clinton. But he was the first Republican to capture Trumbull County since 1928 and swept the Rust Belt for the first time in three decades. His dominance of the electoral map and Republican majorities on Capitol Hill will be his mandate.
‘Trump-licans’
“Trump-Republicans” are the new normal.
The New York businessman, who has feuded with “the Republicans” and accused Democrats of failing American cities, reshuffled the electorate with populist promises to restore manufacturing and rid Washington of corruption.
His consistent message — often amped up or down to suit the crowd before him — transcended partisanship, awakening listless voters.
“They wanted an outsider, and they’re looking for change,” said Pat Boyle, a Republican who grew up in Barberton.
Boyle, 44, bumped into Mayor Bill Judge outside a coffee shop in downtown Barberton Friday. Working at City Hall on the holiday before passing out hot lunches to veterans, Judge took a moment to walk around the block and talk to constituents, many like Boyle who said they will continue to support their Democratic mayor and Republican president.
“I like him,” said Shaw. “[Mayor Judge] has done a lot of good here.”
Shaw echoed Trump’s broader appeal. “I’m tired of Clintons and Bushes. And I think Trump’s more likely to run the country like a business,” he said.
Rejection within GOP
But how Trump delivered his message often irked establishment and polite Republicans.
Nowhere did Republicans turn on Trump more than in Hudson, where 70 percent of residents older than 25 hold college degrees — compared to 32 percent countywide. Romney walloped Obama there by 25 points. Clinton lost by only 6 points in the upscale suburb that is home to state Rep. Kristina Roegner.
Roegner campaigned in that precarious place between publicly denouncing Trump’s misogynistic, racist and xenophobic statements — as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rob Portman did — and staying out of a mudslinging contest that could only dirty her own campaign.
The Hudsonite refused to disclose her intentions before Tuesday. She said Thursday that she voted for Trump to keep the Supreme Court conservative for generations to come and to oppose Clinton’s progressive agenda.
Many of her neighbors, concerned about the bigotry and profanity, refused to support Trump. “Those who did not support Trump did so in large part because they did not like his rhetoric. The things he would say came across as rude or arrogant,” said Roegner.
This made Roegner’s race that much closer. She won by 5 points instead of the 17-point victory she posted in 2014.
Manufactured blues
Summit County communities that swung the furthest for Trump are uniquely blue-collar, and not doing well employing them after decades of wage stagnation and shuttered factories.
Compared to Romney, Trump excelled — sometimes flipping Democratic strongholds — in Lakemore, Springfield, Barberton, Mogadore, Northfield Village and Coventry. In these communities, about 1 in 5 men ages 16 to 64 are either unemployed or have stopped looking for work. Outside of Akron, where Trump did 11 percentage points better than Romney, these are some of the direst figures for working-age men.
Exit polls show Trump led Clinton by 12 points with men. Women supported Clinton by an equal margin.
Trump’s success in places like Barberton, where inflation adjusted wages remain down since 2009, has Mayor Judge questioning whether “as a Democrat, are we really fulfilling our core mission?”
When his father was mayor, parking lots bustled with the cars of thousands of workers at factories like PPG, a chemicals company, and Babcock & Wilcox, an energy producer that laid off another 113 employees in June. The city’s population once hovered around 40,000, with another 20,000 visiting to work every day.
“You could finish high school back in the ’70s and ’80s and get a job with a livable wage in a factory. Those jobs went away. They went down south, then they started going overseas,” said Judge, a “numbers guy” who estimates the current population at about 27,000.
“In my opinion, we never really bounced back,” he said.
Judge’s hometown is so Democratic that Republicans did not challenge his mayoral re-election last year. Nor did they in Lakemore and Mogadore. In Tallmadge, Democratic Mayor David Kline received an unequivocal 75 percent of the vote.
Yet all flipped for Trump. Why?
“Talk about an open-ended question,” said Judge. “I think people are upset. Whether they support one party or not, they want change. And I think it’s different for everyone.”
Turnout for Trump
Turnout was critical to Clinton’s loss — and Trump’s success.
With late mail-in and provisional ballots uncounted, voter turnout from 2012 to 2016 remained stable or ticked upward in Lakemore, Clinton, Munroe Falls, Richfield Village, New Franklin and Springfield. Trump eked out a victory in Munroe Falls, where Obama won in 2012, and trounced Clinton by 19 to 37 points in the other five.
Eight of 31 Summit County communities voted for Clinton, including Akron, Copley Township, Cuyahoga Falls, Fairlawn, Peninsula, Reminderville, and Twinsburg township and city.
More than half of Summit County lives in one of these eight communities, where voter turnout fell four times more than it did in the other 24 communities that preferred Trump.
Democrats regroup
Clinton’s message never penetrated, Tim Crawford said.
The Summit County councilman offered his insurance agency in Norton to the Clinton campaign, which fanned out across the community. Crawford figures he must have visited 1,000 homes.
Half the time, he said, the registered Democrat who came to the door planned to vote for Trump. Astounded, Crawford began to think that the record number of voters who switched party registration by pulling Republican ballots in the primary — to stop Trump, he had hoped — might not come home to Democrats in November.
But the alarm was never sounded. And the Clinton campaign, like the media and the polls, vastly underestimated just how far and deep Trump’s message had permeated even urban and Democratic portions of Ohio.
“What the Democratic Party needs to do is pull these people back, not only in a municipal election but in the governor’s election,” Crawford said, looking forward. “We have to actually get out and talk with them and say ‘what’s on your mind?’ That’s key.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .