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Democrats' Debate Is Set for Ohio, Where Strength of Economy Is Debatable

MANSFIELD, Ohio — When they gather near Columbus for their fourth debate, Democrats will be coming to a state that, if not “great again,” is by many accounts doing quite OK, certainly much better than a decade ago.

Democrats' Debate Is Set for Ohio, Where Strength of Economy Is Debatable

Unemployment is lower than it has been in many years. Wages are inching up. Despite multiple signs of a recession in manufacturing nationally, many manufacturers here say they just don’t see it.

How Ohio votes in 2020 could come down to one question: Are people judging things based on the dismal economy of a decade ago? Or on the heyday of the well-paid union worker in the state’s industrial past?

“If you were to compare what’s happening now to what the past 20 years have been like, things are really good,” said Jay Goyal, 38, who runs a metal manufacturing firm in this small industrial city between Cleveland and Columbus. “Anyone who wants a job right now can get a job, and that hasn’t necessarily been the case.”

Compared with 20 years before that, on the other hand: “That’s where I think it gets a little tricky.”

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Of course, many things are tricky in looking at the economy of Ohio, once a crucial swing state that has drifted steadily toward the Republicans over the past decade.

Ohio still has one of the largest manufacturing workforces in the country, but manufacturing is no longer the dominant employment driver it was. As recently as 1990, it accounted for nearly a quarter of the state’s workers. Now, after years of shrinking population, the loss of talent to other industries and an opioid crisis, it accounts for about one in eight workers.

And the current economic picture is decidedly mixed. On some key measures of economic health, including labor force participation, Ohio has gone from above average to trailing the nation. Median hourly wages, according to a report from Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland-based think tank, are below what they were in 1979.

So these are hardly the boom times. But, as comes up repeatedly in conversation, it has been a whole lot worse.

For all the talk of an industrial recession, small and midsize Ohio manufacturers of everything from corrugated boxes to precision screwdrivers say they’re feeling fine, even better than fine. Overall, things might not be moving as fast as last year, but that was when they were still on a tax-cut-fueled tear.

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“Our manufacturers are reporting a little gradual slowing in their activity rates,” said Mark Schweitzer, a senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. “They are not reporting things dropping off precipitously.”

Mark Romanchuk, 57, who owns two small manufacturing firms in Mansfield and who, as a Republican, won the local state legislative seat in 2013 from Goyal, a Democrat, went further: “We’re not seeing any kind of slowing, and we don’t feel like one’s coming either.”

In interviews, manufacturers attributed any current tapering in growth not principally to President Donald Trump’s trade war, though that has dampened profits, but to a labor market so tight that new skilled workers just can’t be found.

The current General Motors strike, in its fourth week and coming after the closing of a large GM plant in Lordstown, is illustrative of a changed state. A generation ago, when GM was by far the state’s largest employer, this would have shaken Ohio’s economy to the core. But now, as The Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports, GM is the 72nd largest. This puts it just above Starbucks.

Ohioans who pay attention to these things note with amusement that the Democrats are having their debate in a suburb of Columbus, a city that seems markedly unrepresentative of the state it sits in. Though it is the state capital and home of the flagship university, Columbus is often talked of as if it were airlifted from the Sun Belt, a booming, service economy-based city dropped in a state full of shrinking postindustrial hubs.

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But Columbus is a lot more representative than it used to be. The whole state is moving toward the service economy. The Cleveland Clinic is now the state’s largest employer, followed by Walmart and Kroger. There is only one manufacturer, Honda, in the top 20.

This is easy to grasp in Mansfield, where part of the abandoned Westinghouse factory, once the pillar of a boomtown, now sits as a colossal ruin just outside the city center. The litany of plant closings over the past few decades, culminating in the shutdown of a GM plant in 2010, was positively brutal.

These days “Help Wanted” signs line the road into a pretty downtown of boutique shops, salons and a winery-restaurant. It is not quite the Mansfield of 1965, nor the Columbus of 2019. But it is better than it has been for a while.

“If you’re 30 and you were born in Mansfield, this is the best Mansfield has been,” said Jay Allred, the publisher of a local news site, the Richland Source.

Still, many of those readily available jobs are not like the good-paying union jobs of 40 years ago, jobs that were dependable enough to build a life around. The top occupations in the city now are cashiers and retail workers. Even some of the entry-level factory jobs now pay wages that barely cover rent.

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“We have positions that start at $9, $10 and get up to $12 an hour,” said Heidi Spade, 48, who worked in a $12-an-hour factory job herself but now works at a staffing service in a Mansfield nonprofit group. For her clients, “buying a car is not in cards right now.”

At a time when jobs seem to be plentiful, Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown, who grew up in Mansfield, are focusing on the quality of those jobs — the pay and security — especially as companies are doing so well financially.

“Corporate profits have soared, executive compensation has exploded, but wages are flat,” Brown wrote in an email message. After the tax cuts, he continued, “companies turned right around and closed factories, spent $1.5 million every minute of every day on stock buybacks, and companies like GM shipped manufacturing jobs overseas.”

Still, for all the partisan debate, it just can’t be assumed that how people feel economically directly translates into how they will vote. Plenty of voters in prosperous Columbus, for example, are certain that the president is taking the country in the wrong direction.

“He hasn’t done anything for the economy,” said Abby Lavelle, 63, a retired supervisor at the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, who was on her way to a Democratic activist meeting at a Columbus microbrewery.

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Meanwhile, a short drive north, there is Bret Davis, 59, a fourth-generation farmer, who is, in his own words, going through hell.

“The rest of the economy’s going pretty good and we’re sitting here having the worst year we’ve ever had,” he said. China is Ohio’s number one soybean customer and Trump’s trade war has left beans sitting unsold, distraught young farmers considering getting out of farming entirely and Davis with no clue what will happen next. He took Friday’s announcement of a partial trade deal, he said, “with a grain of salt.”

And yet, “the worst that I can see,” he said, maintaining that the trade war has been long-needed and must be seen though to a successful end, “is if the administration changes.”

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