Why these diehard Democrats are rooting for Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ese-die-hard-democrats-are-rooting-for-trump/
WEIRTON, W.Va. — The Ohio Valley is filled with registered Democrats, the kind that hung portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy on their living room walls. It is made of coal and steel towns and union workers, and stretches from the Pittsburgh exurbs across West Virginia’s panhandle into Ohio.
But here in Weirton — where Weirton Steel Company employed 12,000 people and now only 900 — many say they will cast their ballots for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They talk about him over beers at local taverns and at church socials. For many of those in the unions, he’s the first Republican for whom they’ll vote — even as national unions, including the United Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO, have endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“When the steel industry was going good and the coal was good, it was blue,” said George Psaros, 76, a retired Weirton Steel engineer who voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and is undecided in this contest. “Well, the world has changed.”
Ever since Democrats like Bill Clinton embraced free trade, West Virginia has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in greater margins. West Virginians sided with Democrat Michael Dukakis instead of George H. W. Bush in 1988, only one of 10 states to vote blue. But by 2000, George W. Bush won the state by 6 percent of the vote, and in 2012, Mitt Romney won by more than 20 percent.
Now even one of the most reliably Democratic groups — union members — may be turning red, drawn by Trump’s free-trade bashing and resentful of Clinton’s past support for certain international trade agreements.
“I don’t know what Trump would do if he’s elected,” said Mark Glyptis, president of the United Steelworkers Local 2911 and a Trump supporter, who voted for Obama in the past two elections. “But I know what Hillary would do.”
If Trump wants to flip the electoral map and win in November, this may be his most promising strategy. His critique of trade deals may not only help him win Weirton and the rest of West Virginia, but also other, more critical industrial belt states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Nationally, union households have increasingly voted for conservative candidates, data show. In 1996, only 30 percent of union households voted for Republican candidates. In 2012, that increased to 40 percent, and political analysts expect that rise this election cycle......(SNIP)
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