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Panel grapples with impact of Trump’s win on Mahoning Valley
By Sarah Lehr
YOUNGSTOWN
Republican Donald Trump’s victory last week in the presidential race defied readings of polls by most commentators.
Commentators Monday night, nonetheless, attempted to make sense of Trump’s win.
The City Club of the Mahoning Valley hosted a talk, sponsored by The Vindicator and other organizations, at the Stambaugh Auditorium ballroom.
Tim Francisco, professor of English at Youngstown State University, moderated the discussion of how the election would impact the Mahoning Valley.
Panelists debated whether Tuesday’s reordering of the electoral map – including a shift of Rust Belt territory from blue to red – represented a new political order.
Paul Sracic, chairman of the YSU Political Science and International Relations Department, posited that Mahoning County voters who contributed to Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman’s decisive re-election might indicate that a significant share of former Democrats have truly crossed over to the GOP.
Then again, Sracic qualified, such voters might have only wanted to give Trump a compliant Republican Congress because such voters were attracted to the idiosyncrasies of Trump, specifically.
Marilyn Geewax, a Campbell Memorial High School graduate and a senior business editor for National Public Radio, stated that political power results from a more populous region.
She argued the aging Valley will struggle to maintain national political clout if it does not address depopulation. Steel and coal jobs under Trump could be attractive to immigrants, she said, though she doubted those jobs would draw non-immigrant young people to the area.
David Skolnick, political reporter and columnist for The Vindicator, addressed the possibility of those new jobs, adding that if a steel mill opened in the Valley, it would create only “a few hundred” jobs at best because of advances in factory automation.
“Those who voted for [Trump], thinking he was going to bring us back to the glory days of the ’50s and ’60s of this area are sadly mistaken,” he said.
Skolnick added that fracking under Trump’s presidency would be popular in the Valley because of jobs in oil and gas. People in Youngstown are nostalgic for a time when a robust steel industry coincided with a smog hanging over the city and “all types of chemicals” dumped into the Mahoning River, he said.
The panel also responded to questions from audience members, like Gary Davenport. Davenport spoke of the importance of race in the election and asked why the panel included no people of color.
Doug Livingston, politics reporter for the Akron-Beacon Journal, stated that lack of diversity is a pervasive problem in the journalism industry. Livingston discussed covering Trump rallies and noticing “very few minorities” among the crowd. Oftentimes, the press pen was even whiter than the Trump fans, Livingston said.
On the whole, the panelists found it difficult to state definitely what Trump would do as president, given what they described as his often-contradictory statements on policy.
Asked to give a “true/false” answer in response to the statement that Trump’s presidency would be a “bumpy ride,” Skolnick had this to say: “Yeah, we’ve got a guy who’s going to be president of the United States who’s never run for township trustee, so, I’ll go with ‘true.’”