If there was any place in America where President Joe Biden’s economic agenda ought to have won him votes, it would have been Lordstown, Ohio. A September CNN article noted that, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “a gleaming new 2.8 million-square-foot manufacturing plant symbolizes something that has been fleeting in recent years: hope.” Biden was bringing well-paid union jobs in the cutting-edge battery industry to a struggling region long written off as the Rust Belt.
But if Biden was expecting the community to reward his efforts, he was sorely disappointed. In 2024, the county in which Lordstown is located shifted toward Trump by six percentage points compared with 2020, the second-highest swing to Trump of any county in the state.
Lordstown offers a test case of a political theory that has not only guided the Biden administration’s economic policy but also sought to explain the past several decades of American politics. The theory holds that Donald Trump’s 2016 election represented a voter backlash against “neoliberal” economic policies that had impoverished people in the heartland, who in their desperation turned to a populist outsider promising to smash the system that had betrayed them…