Democrats ride working-class economics to Ohio wins; staying power uncertain

Acton carried the Mahoning county Trump won in 2020, 54% to 42%

Democrats won Ohio’s governorship for the first time in 16 years on Tuesday and took a US Senate seat and eight House seats, after campaigns built around working-class economics. Amy Acton defeated the Republican Vivek Ramaswamy to become the state’s next governor, while Sherrod Brown, who lost his Senate seat two years ago, won a Senate race against the incumbent Republican, Jon Husted. Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker who ran on a “workers first” platform, was among the party’s other winners.

The shift was starkest in the Mahoning valley, once the beating heart of America’s steel economy and a hardscrabble, heavily unionized Democratic bastion in north-eastern Ohio. Mass steel-mill closures beginning in the late 1970s wiped out tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, populations declined, and support for Democrats slowly faded; in 2020, Mahoning county voted for a Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, for the first time in a generation. Trump visited in 2017 and told residents: “We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories.” The county’s support for him continued to grow afterward. This week, amid growing frustration over the president’s handling of the economy, Acton won the county 54% to 42%.

But before any verdict that Ohio’s working class has “come home”, historians and political scientists said such framing is too simple. Michael Pierce, a labor historian at the University of Arkansas, called the idea that Democrats lost a monolithic bloc of Ohio voters a “false narrative”. “A lot of commentators confuse the white working class with the working class,” he said. Republican gains in recent years came among the state’s rural white working class, he said, through “a politics of grievance, of culture wars, of scare tactics”.

What “working class” even means is unsettled. Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University, said blue-collar work, lacking a college degree and union membership are “almost completely unrelated categories”, and that sorting by income does not help much either. “A Nepali immigrant who works at a McDonald’s in Columbus is very different from a 60-year-old person in the middle of nowhere in rural Ohio,” Kogan said. “But they would both be lower income.”

David Stebenne, a historian at Ohio State, described not one but two working classes in Ohio. The “upper” one — steelworkers and autoworkers in unionized plants — could once afford houses, cars and college for their children, he said, and many of those families “have sunk back downward” during de-industrialization. Below them is a “lower” working class in low-wage service jobs. Ohio’s median household income, once close to the national figure, has fallen well below it, he said, which makes rising prices for fuel and food hit harder.

Stebenne said that before the election he told anyone who asked that if regular gas was still above $4 on election day, Republicans were likely to do very poorly. And this time, instead of Trump helping to turn out people who do not typically vote, Trump’s low approval rating was “an anchor” for Republicans, he said.

Laura Bucci of St Joseph’s University said the results “suggest more of a latent solidarity within the Rust belt than we’ve talked about previously”. The economic focus of Democratic campaigns “met the moment” for blue-collar voters frustrated with sustained affordability issues, she said. “Everything has felt expensive and hard.”

Jim Conrad, a retired school teacher in Columbus, put it in personal terms earlier this week: “I am an independent. I vote by the issues. I’m tired of billionaires. The gap between the wealthiest and the poor in this country has gotten bigger each year.” Separately, federal data showed the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker — a three-month moving average of composition-adjusted median wage growth for continuously employed workers — standing at 3.9% as of 6 November 2026, while the University of Michigan’s survey found the median household expected prices to rise 4.6% over the coming year, according to FRED.

Acton spent the final days of her campaign describing herself the same way at every stop: “scrappy”, and from Youngstown, the largest city in the Mahoning valley and shorthand in Ohio politics for regular working folks. Acton, who has spoken about living in a tent as an unhoused 12-year-old, used that story to signal she was not the kind of Democrat who grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class suburb. She drove herself around the state for most of the campaign while Ramaswamy flew by private jet. At rallies, she described a Youngstown upbringing in which political parties did not matter, but union affiliation and civic group membership did — a hearkening back to a time when labor was central to identity.

Raymond Irwin, also a historian at Ohio State, said that in the Mahoning valley “you can see how labor feels about politics”, and that “through that region you can see the whole state’s disenchantment with the collapse of industry”.

Brown framed his race as working Ohioans against billionaires and made datacenters a central target. He called Husted “the face of datacenters”, blamed him for the 226 now operating in Ohio, attacked their tax breaks and tied them to soaring electricity bills. Pierce said Brown was “tapping into all of these anxieties about jobs”. “Datacenters aren’t about workers; they’re about replacing workers,” he said. Pierce placed Brown, who is from Mansfield in Richland county, in an older tradition of Ohio labor politics: “He comes from the politics of the 60s and 70s, when the big labor unions really dominated Ohio politics. And he knows how to talk that talk, and he does it really well.”

Brown’s datacenter criticism sits at odds with some building trades unions, which have backed datacenter construction and in recent years drifted toward Republicans. From the 1930s through the 1980s, organized labor was the main financial and organizational pillar of the Ohio Democratic party, but union membership in the state has fallen from about 36% of workers in the late 1970s to between 11% and 12%, Irwin said. Pierce sees a comeback led by public-sector and service unions, and said the AFL-CIO’s work this year for Acton, Brown and a string of House candidates was a throwback to the 1960s and early 1970s.

Not everyone is convinced the week’s results mark another long-term shift in Ohio’s politics, back from red to blue. “There’s a good chance this is a high-water mark for Democrats,” Kogan said, recalling how the party’s 2006 wave in Ohio was erased by the Tea Party in 2010. “Something is in the air,” Pierce said. “And I just can’t piece it together yet.”

The true test, Irwin suggested, will come next year, when voters who tried Trump Republicanism and turned to Brown and Acton start asking what they have gotten for it. “We’re not going to snap their fingers and get the lower costs that we’re hoping for,” he said.