Back to the Battleground BY THE BOSTON STAFF T he four states pivotal to electing Donald Trump occupy special ground on America's electoral map, right on the fault line where the political and economic priorities of the East meet the concerns and sensibilities of the nation's old industrial core. Between the Democratic Party and the voters of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin there was a failure of understanding in 2016, and Trump emerged as the answer. It was shocking to many, especially in deep blue states, but probably shouldn't have been. Will that history repeat in 2020? The Globe dispatched the reporters of its Washington bureau to spend time all over this varied, fascinating, and critical turf. They focused on average people who will cast crucial votes for president in 2020, talking to them not just about politics but about their lives and how they’ve changed in the volatile period since the last election in hopes of illuminating what might happen in the next one. Meet the team Liz Goodwin Jessica Rinaldi Jess Bidgood Craig F. Walker Jazmine Ulloa Erin Clark Laura Krantz Shelby Lum Liz Goodwin is the deputy bureau chief in Washington and covers 2020. Jess Bidgood is a national political reporter in the Globe’s Washington bureau, where she covers campaigns, Congress and how the workings of Washington influence people’s lives. Jazmine Ulloa covers national politics and the 2020 presidential election for the Boston Globe. Laura Krantz covers national politics for the Globe. She previously covered higher education for the paper for four years in Boston. 2 Jessica Rinaldi joined the Boston Globe staff in 2014, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography in 2016. A two-time Pulitzer prize winner for the Denver Post, Craig F. Walker joined the Boston Globe staff in June of 2015 and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2019. Erin Clark is a returning summer intern who recently finished her MA in documentary photography at Ohio University. An Ohio State graduate, Shelby Lum joined the Globe in April 2019 from the Richmond Times-Dispatch where she spearheaded their video journalism efforts. Contents Pennsylvania Page: 4 Ohio Page: 30 Erie, PA: Lordstown, OH: How Trump lured a Pennsylvania roofer away from Democrats An Ohio factory closure stirs populist anger Page: 6 Page: 32 Hazleton, PA: Portsmouth, OH: How Latinos revived a once-dying Pennsylvania city As rehab centers replace pill mills, an Ohio River city fights back Page: 16 Page: 46 Michigan Page: 60 Wisconsin Page: 98 East Grand Rapids, MI: Bloomer, WI: Impeachment is the political line of scrimmage for a Michigan suburb in flux Trump promised Wisconsin’s farmers his trade wars would pay off. They’re still waiting Page: 62 Page: 100 Madison Heights, MI: Milwaukee, WI: They helped Trump win Michigan, then he split their community A gunshot shatters a Milwaukee home, and a mother doubts her vote will stop the next one Page: 74 Page: 110 Port Huron, MI: New London, WI: What happened after a young Trump voter in Michigan transformed into a vegan AOC fan Trump’s evangelical support mystifies his critics, but in Wisconsin, it looks stronger than ever Page: 88 Page: 120 1 Exchange place, Suite 201 • Boston, MA 02109-2132 Copyright © 2019 by The Boston Globe All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers, except for the use of brief quotations in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Works of art under copyright are reproduced by permission, British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data available BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 3 Pennsylvania Erie, PA: How Trump lured a Pennsylvania roofer away from Democrats Page: 6 Hazleton, PA: How Latinos revived a oncedying Pennsylvania city Page: 16 Clouds rolled in over farmland outside of Hazleton. Erin Clark for the Boston Globe 4 x'.-.-. ?5 4 .4Edirib-?5 ?l ?v-J . if" .I-- - . . ?fguy-?uhuBACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 5 ERIE, PA. — NOV. 7, 2019 A Pennsylvania roofer loved Bill Clinton and voted for Obama. Here’s how Trump lured him from the Democrats BY LIZ GOODWIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG F. WALKER H arold Klinzing, a 46-year-old roofer who loves his labor union, is the sort of voter Democratic presidential victories were once built upon. “I loved Bill Clinton,” Klinzing recalled fondly. “He was my favorite president. I loved him to death.” But after voting for Barack Obama in 2008, Klinzing, a lifelong Democrat, had soured on him by 2012 and sat out that election entirely. It wasn’t until he started hearing about Donald Trump in 2015 that Klinzing felt excited about a politician again. “I just absolutely love the way Trump presents himself,” Klinzing said during a recent lunch break while laying down a rubber roof on a high school in Union City. “I’ve always been brutally honest my entire life. I say what I think and if you don’t like me for it at least I’m honest, is the way I look at it. And Trump comes off that way.” In this pleasant lakeside city at the far western edge of Pennsylvania, where residents can expect to be blanketed in eight feet of snow each winter, voting Democrat is a tradition that has been passed down through families, along with a union card. But in 2016, the ties between working class voters here and the Democratic Party snapped, helping Trump narrowly carry Erie County just four years after Obama won it by 16 points. Voters like Klinzing jumped aboard the Trump train, raising questions in this former Democratic stronghold about whether Democrats can win back white working-class voters in Western Pennsylvania this time around amid a stronger local economy fueled by a regional construction boom. 6 CITY HERE Klinzing said he’s open to coming back to his political home — but only once Trump has left office. “I’m not going to say I’m going to be a Republican for the rest of my life,” Klinzing said. “When Trump’s gone, I’m going to go back to both sides. [But] Trump 2020 definitely has my vote.” “I just absolutely love the way Trump presents himself,’’ said Klinzing, a member of the Roofers Union Local 210. Klinzing was taught the importance of a good union job by his dad, an assembler and union president at a tool factory called Reed Manufacturing. Voting Democrat and being in a union were often a package deal in a city that was ruled by organized labor. But as factories and plants started to disappear from Erie in the 1990s, union power also waned, and the rank and file grew restless with the status quo. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 7 ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA “People are getting frustrated because there’s no industry,” said T.J. Sandell, a plumber and the president of the local building trades’ association. T.J. Sandell, a plumber from Erie, is the president of the Great Lakes Building & Construction Trades council. Sandell rattled off a list of plants that had closed: Hammermill Paper, Erie Malleable Iron, and Steris, where his grandfather worked making medical equipment. (The plant announced it would relocate to Mexico in 2006.) The General Electric locomotive factory, meanwhile, has shed more than 1,000 positions since 2013 and is now owned by Wabtec. Residents worried that Erie was no longer a place where a strong work ethic and a high school education were enough to provide for a family. “Those jobs are gone,” Sandell said. “It’s a hard thing to watch when you lose plant after plant.” It was in this environment that Trump rolled into town for a rally in August of 2016. He railed against refugees from Syria — holding up a chart showing their arrival numbers — and promised to build a wall on the Mexican border. Trump also vowed to stop factories from leaving town. ‘It’s a hard thing to watch when you lose plant after plant.’ T.J. Sandell “So Erie has lost a lot, right?” Trump asked. “I promise we can fix it so fast. We will stop these countries from taking our jobs.” Klinzing was among the 9,000 fans who packed the Erie Insurance Arena that day, delighted to see Trump in the flesh. After quickly growing tired of what he saw as Obama’s overly conciliatory approach to foreign policy, Klinzing appreciated Trump’s tough talk. “What I liked about him is he wanted to take care of America first before all these different countries,” he said. At the time, Klinzing was worried he might have to leave Erie, where he was born and raised, to find a better paying job. He was waking up at 3 a.m. each day to drive two hours to Reno, Pa. — the closest roofing job he could find that provided the amount of hours he needed. That left less time to spend with his wife, who worked the night shift as a nurse, and his three teenage sons at home. 8 CITY HERE “We were finding we had to go farther and farther for work,” he said. He was even considering a job offer down in North Carolina, despite not wanting to uproot his family and leave his friends in Erie. “There was a time when I really thought I may go do this,” he said. The Erie Malleable Iron Company, on 12th Street, was one of several manufacturing plants to close around Erie. But it wasn’t just Trump’s promises about jobs that attracted Klinzing, whose arms sport elaborate deer tattoos in homage to his favorite hobby, hunting. He liked the bluster and the bombast, and he related to the way Trump spoke. Klinzing also believed that society had become too politically correct and that minorities play “the race card” and accuse white people of racism too much. “People look at [Trump] as a bad person, but everyone doesn’t speak proper,” he said. “Look at me, I don’t have that proper language. That’s the way I look at him — he’s just honest.” Meanwhile, any resistance he received for supporting Trump from those who called his rhetoric racist just put him more firmly in his corner. Klinzing installed a security camera to watch the 20 Trump signs he placed in his front yard after someone tore up the single one he had posted previously and threw it in the street. Union leaders could sense a larger sea change in the traditionally Democratic area as Election Day loomed in 2016. “Even my own people who were usually Democrats — they came right out and told me about their vote for Trump,” said John Renwick, a bus driver who is the president of the local transit union. “Boy, we had some heated, heated conversations.” BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 9 CITY HERE Wabtec Corporation, which took over a General Electric plant, is one of the largest employers in Erie. The president of the union that serves the locomotive plant, Scott Slawson, also noticed a change in the air. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out when you see a sign for a politician everywhere that chances are that’s the winning candidate,” Slawson said. In the end, Trump picked off many more union voters than is typical for a Republican presidential candidate, fueling his victory. National exit polling showed Democrat Hillary Clinton won 51 percent of voters in union households, down from the 58 percent Obama carried four years earlier. Union votes in Erie have traditionally been a Democratic stronghold within a Democratic stronghold — but Clinton could barely hold on to a majority of those voters. “Hillary’s campaign in the last two or three weeks was pretty much, ‘Look how bad he is — you gotta elect me because he’s a jerk,’ ” explained Rick Bloomingdale, president of the AFL-CIO in Pennsylvania. “And Trump’s campaign was, ‘I’m going to bring jobs back.’” But Bloomingdale — and many other local union leaders who did not follow their rank and file onto the Trump train — believes this election will be different. 10 BY THE NUMBERS Pennsylvania Demographics: Population 12,790,505 How state voted in 2016 Hillary Clinton 47.90% Donald Trump 48.60% How state voted in 2008 How state voted in 2012 Barack Obama Mitt Romney Barack Obama John McCain 52.10% 46.70% 54.70% 44.30% Democrat Other How county voted in 2012 Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races Unemployment rate in June 2019: 3.80% Median income: $56,951 City of Erie, Pa., demographics Population 98,970 How county voted in 47.00% White Republican Erie County Hillary Clinton 77.30% 10.60% 6.80% 0.10% 3.20% 0% 1.80% Donald Trump 48.60% How county voted in 2008 Barack Obama Mitt Romney Barack Obama John McCain 57.4% 41.3% 59.3% 39.4% 70.20% 15.50% 7.50% 0.30% 2.90% 0% 3.20% White Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races Unemployment rate in June 2019: 4.90% Median income: $35,802 SOURCE: State of Pennsylvania, Census BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 11 ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA “People see that he’s a con man,” he said of Trump. “He made a lot of promises and he didn’t live up to it.” This brick building once housed the Shaw Piano Company and later the Cohen Industrial Supply Co. in Erie. Coal miners and electricians have been laid off in the state, he said, and a long-promised infrastructure bill never materialized. The manufacturing sector has also shed thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that could affect union workers in factories who were drawn to Trump’s pledge to stop companies from moving plants overseas. Meanwhile, Trump faces an impeachment inquiry, which hasn’t turned off Klinzing but could affect the decisions of other voters. But the reality is more complicated. In Erie, the economy has picked up, thanks in part to a wave of construction projects. Two hospitals are building $100 million additions to their complexes, and the largest business in the city — Erie Insurance — is also embarking on an extensive construction project. Two hours south, near Pittsburgh, a giant new plastics factory — called a “cracker plant” because it “cracks” natural gas molecules as it transforms them into plastic pellets — is going up. The $6 billion plant, one of the largest privately funded projects in the state since World War II, is drawing construction workers all the way from Erie. That construction bonanza could solidify support for Trump among those in building trade unions, like Klinzing, who locals say make up the backbone of Trump’s union fans. Klinzing emphatically credits Trump for the increase in construction jobs. But it’s unclear if his neighbors feel the same way. A September poll from Erie’s Mercyhurst University found that although voters in Erie County feel significantly better about their local economy since Trump took office, a majority of them — 53 percent — still disapprove of the job he’s doing as president. That suggests they don’t credit him with the gains or that other concerns about him outweigh the rosier financial outlook. 12 Union leaders also don’t see the connection between the construction boom and Trump. “These types of projects don’t all of a sudden happen because a certain individual in Washington gets elected,” said James Nuber, the business manager of a local electricians union in Erie. “It takes years of planning. But whoever holds the attention of the country can claim responsibility, I guess.” Trump did just that on a trip to the cracker plant in August, boasting that he gave the workers the project even though the owner, Shell Chemical Appalachia, picked the location in 2012, halfway through Obama’s tenure. (The company credited tax breaks provided by then-Governor Tom Corbett for its decision.) “This would have never happened without me and us,” Trump proclaimed to an audience of union workers who are building the plant. The president also delivered a threat to union leaders — who for the most part remain opposed to him — to back him or else. “I’m going to speak to some of your unions’ leaders to say, ‘I hope you’re going to support Trump.’ OK?” he said. “And if they don’t, vote them the hell out of office because they’re not doing their job.” Erie’s union leaders point to the comments as one more sign that Trump is no friend to labor and predict he won’t be able to hold onto their votes this time around. But Klinzing said he wasn’t bothered by Trump targeting the union leadership. “I probably would have laughed and kind of went with it,” he said. “It’s not like he’s out there saying, ‘I’m going to try closing all your unions down.’ ” Casey Richardson sported a roofers union sweatshirt while working with Klinzing. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 13 SCENES FROM Pennsylvania Marsh and Sam Amenti folded a blanket while their children, Emery, 5, and Keagan, 9, played on Beach 11 at Presque Isle State Park on Lake Erie in Erie, Pa., last month. Craig F. Walker/ Globe Staff People participated in a limbo competition during Fun Fest in downtown Hazleton. Erin Clark for the Boston Globe A wheeled hay rake sat outside Kafferlin Sales and Service in Union City, Pa. Craig F. Walker/ Globe Staff/Globe Staff Next Page: Evening lights hit the top of a church in a quiet Hazleton neighborhood. Recent changes in the community have led to a shift in the historically Italian neighborhoods and have resulted in an increase in the Latino population. Erin Clark for the Boston Globe A couple took in the view from the Bicentennial Tower on Lake Erie in Erie. The 187-foot tower was built to celebrate the city’s bicentennial, 1996. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Corn grew in a field outside Union City. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff A man passed the Warner Theatre in Erie. The theater was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff A man held a friend’s fishing rod, as well as his own, while fishing on Lake Erie. Craig F. Walker/ Globe Staff 14 CITY HERE HAZLETON, PA. — OCT. 17, 2019 ‘We can give the whole nation a lesson if they want.’ How Latinos revived a once-dying Pennsylvania city BY LAURA KRANTZ PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIN CLARK B ob Curry is a man in constant motion, not unlike this fast-changing community he’s always championing. Passing a colorful mural in the community center he runs, its rainbow letters spelling out a Maya Angelou quote about the strength and beauty of diversity, he paused for effect. “You see our mural, if you don’t like it, get back on the elevator, you’re free to leave,” Curry proclaimed. 16 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA Previous page: Hazeltonians reacted to a hula hoop competition during Fun Fest in downtown Hazleton, Pa. He’s kidding — sort of. The Hazleton One Community Center is in a small city all too familiar with the kind of incendiary anti-immigrant proposals and political dog whistles that have been championed by President Trump. Back in 2006, the City Council voted to make English the official language and proposed fines for landlords and employers who rented to or hired undocumented immigrants, all in an attempt to preserve, as one official said back then, “Small Town USA.” The resulting headlines spread from coast to coast. Curry and most others don’t feel a need to talk about that anymore. Time has marched on, and Hazleton has changed with it. Curry is particularly frustrated by all the out-of-state reporters who trek to his community to write what he calls the same, tired story. It usually includes the phrase “former coal town” and an infamous man by the name of Lou Barletta. “I can tell you how to save yourself a lot of trouble,” Curry told yet another of the visiting reporters, the one you’re reading now. “Go down to Jimmy’s luncheonette on Broad Street and there will be 16 people in there with MAGA hats and then just interview two or three of them. . . . And then you can say the people of Hazleton are hardscrabble, blah blah blah, and there’s your story.” It would be a fine story, but the problem, as Curry well knows, is that it would be nowhere near complete. To understand the man, his community center, and the city they both serve, it helps to zoom out. Maria Mateo held her grandson Ian, while her daughter, Nicarol Soto, kissed her son’s cheek while campaigning for Hazleton City Council. If elected, Soto will be the first Latino on the Hazleton council. Like the rest of this swath of northeast Pennsylvania, Hazleton flourished more than three-quarters of a century ago during the mining of the anthracite coal buried deep below the region’s green hills. But that industry, and that generation, began to fade in the 1950s. For a while Hazleton was practically a ghost town. Then starting in the early 2000s, something strange happened. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 17 CITY HERE Hazleton One Community Center cofounder Bob Curry spoke with Roger Rivera before the start of the afterschool program. A new industry took root, and with it, a new population of mostly Latino families arrived from New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Hazleton is located near a confluence of major highways that connect it to much of the Eastern Seaboard. The proliferation of online shopping gave birth to a booming sector of distribution warehouses, long low-slung buildings tucked into the rolling hills that surround the city. And with those warehouses came salaries that would cover the cost of a perfectly nice home. Families arrived in pursuit of a middle-class life. So the reporter saw that Jimmy’s is, indeed, on East Broad Street, selling its signature hot dogs that made the luncheonette a local landmark. But on the way there it’s impossible not to see something else: young Latina mothers 18 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA pushing strollers along the sidewalks, steaming plates of pollo guisado at Sazón Latino restaurant, and just down the street from Jimmy’s, a sign for El Mensajero, Hazleton’s Spanish-language newspaper. It is along this vibrant stretch that the past meets the future to create a sometimes unsettling present. And it is here that there are more than a few hints about what might happen when swing-state voters with outsized influence decide in 2020 whether Donald Trump should be president for four more years. “Everything has changed here,” Curry said. Sometimes numbers tell a starker story than words, and in Hazleton, that may well be the case. The city of Hazleton voted two-to-one for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The county that surrounds it, Luzerne, a trade union stronghold that twice voted for Barack Obama, flipped to Trump in 2016 by a 26,000-vote margin. That represented nearly 60 percent of his narrow victory margin in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. ‘We always talk about how one candle lights another. This ain’t one candle lighting another, this is lots of candles and really helping to try to illuminate the city.’ Bob Curry At its peak, in the 1940s, when coal was still being mined from the nearby hills, this was a city of some 50,000 residents, and life was booming. By the year 2000, the population had shrunk to less than half that, and the community felt like it was living in the past tense. The 2000 US Census reported 1,000 Latinos in Hazleton. A decade later, that number soared to 10,000. Many in the city believe that will double in the 2020 census to 20,000 Latinos — the vast bulk of Hazleton’s population. The overwhelming majority are legal residents or US citizens. Amilcar Arroyo is in many ways the personification of this change, as well as the chronicler of it. He is the publisher of El Mensajero, and from his firstfloor office, he has seen the sleepy downtown street revived by Latino families who have flowed into town over the past two decades. There were few children when Arroyo arrived some 30 years ago from Peru; now they are everywhere. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 19 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA Amid the surge in Latino residents, Arroyo has taken it upon himself to show the town the many contributions of the Latino community. There always seems to be a need for more justification. Amilcar Arroyo, editor of a Spanish-language newspaper, worked in his office in downtown Hazleton. Arroyo, who founded the paper in 2003, has lived in Hazleton for more than 30 years So he keeps a tall whiteboard in his office where he has scribbled a long list: barbers, beauty shops, car garages, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, discotheques, furniture stores, pawn shops, transportation companies, media companies, cleaning businesses, photographers, DJs, nail artists. One afternoon, he remembered he needed to add something else — food trucks. “I want to present how many businesses we have in Hazleton,” he said. “And say: This is what we have brought to Hazleton.” This is a far cry from 2006, when Lou Barletta was mayor. Little Hazleton landed in the national news when the City Council passed the English language ordinance, which Barletta said was designed to preserve the city’s fading way of life. But it made for tense times in Hazleton. The measure never went into effect and a court found it unconstitutional, but the city developed an anti-immigrant reputation nevertheless. Nearly 15 years later, the city is still evolving and the political tensions have eased. “What’s been happening in the US happened in Hazleton in 2006,” Arroyo said. After the controversy, Barletta took his ambition further. In 2010, he won a seat in Congress and later found a hero in Trump. When Barletta ran as the Republican nominee for Senate last year, Trump came to Luzerne County to stump for him. But Barletta lost handily to Democratic incumbent Bob Casey. It’s been more than eight years since Barletta was mayor. During that time, the Latinos kept coming to Hazleton. 20 BY THE NUMBERS Pennsylvania Demographics: Population 12,790,505 How state voted in 2016 Hillary Clinton 47.90% Donald Trump 48.60% How state voted in 2008 How state voted in 2012 Barack Obama Mitt Romney Barack Obama John McCain 52.10% 46.70% 54.70% 44.30% Democrat Other How county voted in 2012 Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races Unemployment rate in June 2019: 3.80% Median income: $56,951 City of Hazleton, Pa. demographics: Population 24,882 How county voted in 38.90% White Republican Luzerne County Hillary Clinton 77.30% 10.60% 6.80% 0.10% 3.20% 0% 1.80% Donald Trump 58.30% How county voted in 2008 Barack Obama Mitt Romney Barack Obama John McCain 51.70% 46.90% 53.60% 45.20% 41.60% 2.70% 54.20% 0% 0.60% 0% 0.80% White Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races Unemployment rate in June 2019: 8.10% Median income: $39,950 SOURCE: State of Pennsylvania, Census BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 21 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA Up the hill from Broad Street, the gridded neighborhoods are filling up again with young families. Flowers sprout through cracks in the sidewalks. Sloping awnings cool front porches. Tucked between the modest homes is the community center that Curry runs with his wife, Elaine. It is housed in a two-story brick building, a former Catholic school that was dying. A local celebrity, Major League Baseball manager Joe Maddon, bought it and his friends the Currys run its programs. Elaine is related to Maddon and they grew up next door to each other on 11th Street in the 1960s. Their fathers owned a plumbing business. Curry left a corporate job to run the center full time when it opened six years ago. He and Elaine don’t take salaries so this is not a luxurious retirement, but their house is paid for and their daughters graduated from college. “Why not take this opportunity and Edwarlin Gomez (center) practiced basketball while athletic director Daniel Jorge (right) coached during an open court practice at Hazleton One Community Center. do something terrific on a grand scale?” Curry said. “We always talk about how one candle lights another. This ain’t one candle lighting another, this is lots of candles and really helping to try to illuminate the city.” When they opened the center, the Currys hoped they might see 300 children in the first month of their afterschool program. Instead, families flooded through their doors, and they’ve never served fewer than 1,000 people — children and adults — each week. The center draws most of its kids from two nearby schools, and, like them, its population is about 80 percent Latino. Many of the younger ones are still mastering English. So after the center opened, the Currys quickly added English language courses for adults, citizenship classes, bilingual pre-kindergarten, 22 CITY HERE and summer camps that cost $25 per week. This summer, the project was murals. The basement walls are now splashed with color. The hallway smells of paint. The children started the summer painting a daytime mural, but soon added a nighttime scene because someone drew fireflies and they needed the dark. Ashley Salazar (left) watched as her friend Jaidyn Jones challenged fellow students in an arm wrestle during the afterschool program at Hazleton One Community Center. On the daytime mural, one boy painted a eucalyptus tree, whose leaves are poisonous, which makes them a safe place for butterflies to lay eggs. Another boy painted a treehouse in the eucalyptus tree and inside is a man labeled the “bug inspector.” He speaks his own language, Bug. There is a slide for the inspector to descend from his tall perch. Earlier in the summer, when Trump announced that there would be massive immigration raids across the country, the kids only wanted to paint in the dark BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 23 CITY HERE Mariluz Rodriguez finished her chalk drawing as she competed in “Peace, Love, Chalk,” a four-hour competition that took place in the middle of Broad Street in Hazleton. mural. Someone drew an alien spacecraft that captured the fireflies, and many of the children painted rocket ships hurtling away through the darkness. “There is an undercurrent of nervousness and trepidation that flows through the city,” Curry said. “People haven’t felt that in their day-to-day lives yet, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” Across from the colorful Maya Angelou mural, an 18-year-old girl in a pink T-shirt is balanced on a ladder, listening to the new “Spider-Man’’ movie soundtrack and the Notorious B.I.G. in her earbuds while she paints another mural. Mariluz Rodriguez represents the new Hazleton. Her family moved here from Queens, N.Y., when she was 8. Now she is a mentor at the center and preparing to leave for college on a full scholarship. “It was just weird being different at first, but after a while it didn’t matter, you’re just part of the community,” she said as she paused to have a snack. 24 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA Like many families, the Rodriguezes came for the jobs. For years the family, who are all legal residents, had bounced among apartments and relatives’ homes in New York City and grew weary of the hustle that was necessary to afford the high cost of living. Mariluz Rodriguez’s father, David, came to Hazleton first, following his brother to a job working nights doing heavy labor in the Walmart distribution center. Soon her mother, Penelope, followed with Rodriguez and her younger sister. Competition among the online shopping distribution centers has driven wages up to around $15 an hour plus benefits. It’s not a lot, but enough, if both parents work, to afford a mortgage. Within a year, the Rodriguez family owned a yellow brick duplex that felt like a castle. For the first time, Mariluz Rodriguez had her own bedroom, and she found a forgotten closet in the attic full of toys. Soon she had a new baby brother. Her father was promoted at the Walmart center and is now a shipping router. After a while, some of her relatives in Hazleton moved back to New York because they missed the city. “We stayed because it’s working for us,” Penelope Rodriguez said. “We are seeing our kids flourish here.” Mariluz Rodriguez played basketball and softball and earned a purple belt in tae kwon do. She enrolled at the arts academy pilot program, where she recently finished a hallway mural, and she is working on another one she was hired to paint downtown. Penelope Rodriguez leaned into her daughter, Mariluz (center), after Mariluz competed in the art competition. Mariluz recently began college on a scholarship, where she plans to continue her artwork. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 25 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA Her younger siblings started going to the community center and soon Rodriguez became a mentor there, and a painting instructor. This year, Elaine Curry gave her a wall to paint her own mural. She designed a glowing bouquet of flowers that surrounds the doors to the elevator. These are the things Rodriguez thinks about, not demographic shifts, presidential politics, or a sense of belonging. She’s gotten a few looks over the years, but she said she has never felt like a target of racism. “Here, even though there are always the little things that you get from people, we still have it off really well, and we make it work. But for other parts of the country it’s not working at all,” she said. “It’s hard to understand that people could do that.” People walked down the main throughway in Hazleton after a parade on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps nowhere are the cultural changes in Hazleton more on display than at St. Gabriel Church, an Irish-Catholic parish down the street from the offices of El Mensajero newspaper. The church, built almost 100 years ago, thrived when coal mining brought European immigrants. Like this recent wave of newcomers, they came seeking jobs and brought with them their families and their culture. The end of coal mining, and later manufacturing, swept away many of the parishioners at St. Gabriel, but now the pews are filling again. On a Saturday afternoon in late summer, the church’s old rose window cast colored bits of light onto those pews. The congregation, now mostly Latino, is raising money to repair cracks and leaks in the old building. Outside the church, whose pointy spires 26 CITY HERE rise up like a mini French cathedral, speakers pumped lively music and a dance troupe of young girls performed as parents filmed with their smartphones. Food tents served chicharron de pollo, platano frito, and pastelitos de carne. At one booth you could still find a taste of the past: fried dough and pierogies. Three longtime friends, who remember a different Hazleton, stood in front of the fryer. Nicarol Soto attempted to dress her son Ian, 2, in the bedroom of her Hazleton home after getting home from work and getting ready to canvass the community for her City Council run. “It’s not that I’m a racist, it’s just that you notice it. You don’t see very many white people,” said Andy Martz, 69, her wispy hair tucked under a cap as she cooked. “When our grandparents came here they assimilated into the community,” she said as she flipped bits of dough into the sizzling oil. “They were all immigrants, but they all learned to live together. But here we find the Latino community doesn’t want to assimilate.” As Martz spoke, a young Latina walked by, introducing herself to people BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 27 HAZELTON, PENNSYLVANIA at the festival. Nicarol Soto is the first Latino to win a Democratic primary for Hazleton City Council. Juggling a full-time job and a young family, she is now focused on the November general election, when she hopes to become the first Latino on the council — the same one that almost 14 years ago passed Barletta’s ordinance. Soto, whose kind voice softens her firm resolve, said Hazleton is becoming more open, even among older residents. “We are past that,” she said of the earlier controversy. “We can give the whole nation a lesson if they want.” The shadow of Mariluz Rodriguez was cast upon her chalk mural in downtown Hazleton. As the end of August approached, Rodriguez prepared to move out of that yellow brick duplex that once felt like a castle. She packed her things for Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a school about an hour south where she has a six-year scholarship to study applied digital arts. She got a mini-fridge for her dorm when she helped her tae kwon do instructor, who is retiring, clean out his dojo. Rodriguez would like to move back after she graduates, but she wants to be an animator for Pixar and those jobs aren’t in Hazleton. On one of their last Sundays together as a family, she relaxed at home. Her mother cut up oranges in the kitchen for a snack as ground beef simmered on the stove. Propped on a shelf in the dining room was a chalk drawing Rodriguez made of a sea turtle with colorful coral on its back. Conversation drifted from the murals to current events. Mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. And Trump. Penelope Rodriguez said she has never felt the kind of racism you hear 28 CITY HERE about on television in Hazleton. Her co-workers and parents in the PTA have been kind and welcoming. The neighbors on their street know each other. Evening light blanketed Broad Street, the main thoroughfare in Hazleton. Sometimes she sees outrageous things posted on Facebook, but these days that almost seems normal. “I never really had that influence us personally,” she said. Which is exactly why Curry said he is running the community center. And he is sure it’s part of the reason why Hazleton didn’t vote for Trump. Because whites and Latinos have come to know each other here. “The unknown, which is the great fear, becomes the familiar. And when it’s the familiar, your biases start to dissipate,” Curry said. His words hung there for a moment in the warm summer air, echoing those in the center’s colorful new mural. . . . in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 29 Ohio Lordstown, OH: An Ohio factory closure stirs populist anger Page: 32 Portsmouth, OH: As rehab centers replace pill mills, an Ohio River city fights back Page: 46 People flocked to the Dari Creme on 2nd Street in Portsmouth, Ohio. Owner Austin Born, 26, said he is the third generation in the family business, his grandfather opened the ice-cream stand in 1955. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff 30 BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 31 LORDSTOWN, OHIO — OCT. 27, 2019 An Ohio factory closure stirs populist anger. Who will that help in 2020? BY JESS BIDGOOD PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG F. WALKER They stood outside in the dark, illuminated by barrel fires and the headlights of trucks lurching by, and they were angry. The Chevrolet Cruze plant behind them had been idle for six months and shed thousands of jobs. They were the laid-off, reassigned, and retired factory workers who had spent decades inside, fitting headlights and slipping windows into doors as compact sedans took shape on the assembly line. Some of the plant’s former employees had stayed here in Northeast Ohio, perhaps without a job or with a worse-paying one, while many of their neighbors moved away. They scattered, taking new assignments from Missouri to Michigan, leaving their families behind. Now, in mid-September, they were back. General Motors workers had just walked off the job around the country, striking in protest of tiered wages, eroded job security, and a prosperous company they felt was not sharing enough of its profits with employees who had made sacrifices to help keep it afloat during leaner times. Here in Lordstown, there were virtually no jobs left to walk away from. But the auto workers, past and present, came anyway, bringing the strike to the doorstep of a ghost plant in a last-ditch attempt to pressure the big company to reopen it and restore their way of life. “The American public — we’re all getting screwed,” Bob Meyer, a disabled retiree who worked for General Motors for more than 17 years, said as he settled into a camp chair on the first full night of the strike. He had tied an old “UAW on Strike” sign tied around his sweat shirt. As for the cause of the current collision, he pointed to the same villain named by just about everyone here: Corporate greed. 32 CITY HERE The strike would last for 40 days. It ended Friday when workers ratified a new contract that raised wages and offered a path to permanent jobs for temporary workers. But the pact also allowed GM to close the Lordstown plant for good, dashing any hopes for a revival. United Auto Worker Joe Nero “Buffalo Joe” picketed outside the General Motors plant in Lordstown. Two years ago, President Trump said he would help. He came to Northeast Ohio, a place where many voters gave him a shot after years of backing Democrats, which helped him win the state. He promised to revive the region’s struggling manufacturing sector, and to be an all-out advocate for blue collar America. It is a promise so far not kept, at least not in Lordstown. To many, it feels like things here have only gotten worse, stoking the populist anger that has long coursed through this corner of country increasingly divided by economic inequities. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 33 LORDSTOWN, OHIO Democratic presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are seeking to capitalize on the tide of frustration about corporate greed and the diminished power of workers, and other Democrats are sure to point out that, in places such as this, the manufacturing revival critical to Trump’s own everyman pitch has yet to materialize. Retired lawyer and labor activist Staughton Lynd offered his support to United Auto Workers picketing outside the GM plant in Lordstown. Meyer, who said he voted twice for Barack Obama and spent four nights a week on the picket line “fighting for the middle class,” might seem like an ally for Democrats, but he embodies the party’s challenge. Although he talks economics like Warren or Sanders, his loyalties are now firmly ensconced with Trump. “They’re just smoke and mirrors,” Meyer said of the populist liberals, describing their visits to picket lines outside other GM plants as political posturing. Trump is a welcome antidote to the political correctness he loathes. “So many people are getting offended by anything and everything,” Meyer said. “It wasn’t a bunch of wusses that made this country great.” Voters like Meyer have turned Northeast Ohio into a place where populism is at a crossroads, tugged between Democrats’ soak-the-rich liberalism and Trump’s anti-immigrant truculence, and 2020 will be a test of which party can best harness that anger. But even though the economy has not soared in this corner of Ohio, there is more blame for GM than for Trump, who enjoys an enduring well of support here — and little sign that Democratic presidential candidates’ populist messages have found receptive new ears. “Trump’s not to blame for this,” said Lisa Himes, 50, a former motor line worker who was picketing on the fourth day of the strike, as the plant glowed gold in the late afternoon light. “I know that he was for us. He’s for the working people.” 34 CITY HERE Populism, labor, and voting Democrat used to go hand in hand in the Mahoning Valley, a once-booming steel-producing region along the Pennsylvania border. Trumbull County, which is part of the valley and contains Lordstown, gave President Obama a 22-point victory in 2012. Retired United Auto Worker Larry Buck picketed outside the GM plant in Lordstown last month. But the region’s heyday seems a receding memory; it has become a place that embodies the decline in American manufacturing. Black Monday, the day in 1977 when nearby Youngstown Sheet & Tube closed and shed 5,000 workers, is singed in the collective memory. And the dark times kept coming; Trumbull County lost 62.5 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2016. This legacy drew special attention from Trump in 2016. He visited nearby Vienna to rail against trade deals and won Trumbull County by 6 percentage points over Hillary Clinton. During the first summer of his presidency, he returned to Youngstown for a “rally in the valley,” and promised to bring business back to the shuttered plants that dot this area. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 35 LORDSTOWN, OHIO United Auto Worker Ernie Long talked with fellow workers at the UAW Local 1112 union hall in Lordstown. “I was looking at some of those big, incredible, once-job producing factories, and my wife, Melania, said, ‘What happened?’” Trump said. “I said, those jobs have left Ohio, they’re all coming back.” Then he offered some advice that made a deep impression. “Don’t sell your house. Do not sell it. We’re going to get those values up. We’re going to get those jobs coming back, or we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build new ones,” Trump said, to explosive applause. Tommy Wolikow, a laid-off engine line worker at the plant, was sitting in the fifth row, and he believed the president. “It felt like he was talking to me,” he said. “I’d just bought a house in Lordstown, two miles away from the plant.” The economy under Trump is doing well overall, but manufacturing is hurting again, and the bad news has kept piling up in Lordstown. The closure of the GM plant, which had been a major presence in the area since 1964, was a gut punch, leading to the loss of 7,711 jobs at the plant and other businesses that depended on it. The closure came in waves. There was the layoff of the third shift, and the second shift after that. The last round of bad news came in November 2018, when the plant’s managers paused operations and gathered the staff for an “all people’s meeting.” There, RaNeal Edwards, 49, remembered, the workers heard a word that stunk of euphemism: The plant was being “unallocated.” The news spread before she could even tell her family. “My son texted me, he said, ‘The plant is closing, is that true?’ I said, ‘Correct.’ He said, ‘Do we have to move?’ I said, ‘We do.’” 36 CITY HERE As the March closure approached, Edwards said, “We started getting rid of the red cars, the black cars.” The milk white ones came last. Edwards, who worked in final processing at the plant, inspected the last Cruze when it rolled off the line, officially ending the 1,600 jobs left at the plant. The idling came after sales of the Cruze had declined, and was part of a bigger restructuring that GM initially announced would close up to five factories in all and cut as many as 14,000 jobs in North America. GM offered many workers a chance to transfer to other plants, but that meant they had to uproot and scatter. On Sept. 3, Edwards reported to a new job in Lansing, Mich. She rents an apartment there with another worker and kept her home near Lordstown, making her one of numerous workers now living lives split in two. Ray Dota, of Austintown picketed outside the GM plant in Lordstown. Dota started working at the plant 41 years ago, when he was 21. He said, “We saved GM from bankruptcy, we’d just like to share in their prosperity. We want to keep our jobs and make cars here in America.” Tresa Dixon, 45, got sent even further away by GM, to Bowling Green, Ky. Her husband, as well as their children and grandson, have all stayed in this area. Dixon makes the eight-hour drive home as often as possible, and that included during the first week of the strike. “I won’t get to see him grow up, and it rips my guts out,” Dixon said, as her BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 37 LORDSTOWN, OHIO grandson sat next to her in a booth at the Lordstown Apple Cider Festival, where the family always volunteers. Behind them, an old metal press was squeezing juice from apples. For Dixon, Trump’s promise of renewed prosperity echoed sourly. “Don’t sell your house? Jobs are coming? Seriously?” she asked, disgusted. “They listened. They want that so desperately, a lot of these places, they believed him. They wanted to believe him.” GM “unallocated” the 6.2 million-square foot plant in Lordstown, where they built the Chevrolet Cruze compact car until March of this year. The first thing you see when you drop off Interstate 80 into Lordstown is the empty factory, festooned with a stories-high blue banner depicting an enormous Chevy Cruze. Now there are weeds growing in the cracks in the parking lot. Other nearby businesses withered away after the plant went idle, like Magna Seating, a parts supplier that closed the week the plant did, and Nese’s Country Cafe, a hangout for GM workers, which now sits empty. So for a president who promised a new manufacturing boom that has not arrived, Lordstown and the rest of Northeast Ohio seem possibly a front line — a crucial test of whether voters who gave him a shot in 2016 will blame him for the economic problems and go back to their old Democratic voting habits. Could the anger he harnessed so effectively ever be turned against him? It’s early but so far the picture is mixed: During last year’s midterm elections, Republicans in the Mahoning Valley picked up a state House and state Senate seat, but Democratic populists such as Senator Sherrod Brown and Representative Tim Ryan performed well in the area. 38 That has put this community under the national media’s microscope. Many workers on the picket line expressed deep frustration with Trump, but they were usually people who hadn’t voted for him and wondered how their coworkers ever could have. Wolikow, the worker who watched Trump’s Youngstown rally, isn’t so sure about him anymore — and his change of heart has been meticulously chronicled by The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, local TV stations, and others. “I see him tweeting, ‘Get Lordstown back up, here we go again, the union and GM, get yourself together,’” Wolikow said, paraphrasing recent Trump tweets about the strike. “That’s not helping his chance on UAW members voting for him.” Others here have not had that kind of change of heart, because they still see the president as an advocate — or because they were drawn to Trump by other aspects of his ideology, such as his scathing opposition to illegal immigration. Lisa Himes, the former motor line worker, was picketing in front of the plant, standing near a bedsheet that had been strung up and spray painted with the words “GM Invest in Lordstown.” She put in 10 years at the plant before leaving to pursue nursing, but its closure turned her life upside down anyway. Himes’ husband was still working there, and he has transferred to a job in Tennessee. Now Himes has done exactly what Trump said she wouldn’t have to. “We have our house up for sale,” Himes said. “We’re just waiting for that to sell, and we can be a family again.” ‘Everybody has a right to be here, a good job, and be safe, but not when it takes away from our privileges.’ Lisa Himes Himes was picketing alongside her brother, Bill Brown, 61, who retired from the plant after years of work in the trim and body shops. To Himes, GM was the culprit of Lordstown’s rash of bad luck. For Brown, it was the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, the sweeping trade deal between the United States, Canada, and Mexico put in place in 1994. Both voted for Trump in 2016 — although Himes said she used to consider herself a Democrat — and neither blamed Trump, whose political attraction was, of course, not just about the economy. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 39 BY THE NUMBERS Ohio Demographics: Population 11,609,756 How state voted in 2016 Hillary Clinton 43.56% Donald Trump 51.69% State voter turn out in 2016 How state voted in 2012 71.33% Barack Obama Mitt Romney 50.67% 47.69% Democrat Other State voter turn out in 2012 70.54% How county voted in 2012 Barack Obama 60% Mitt Romney 37.3% SOURCE: State of Ohio, Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics 40 Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races Unemployment rate in June 2019: 4% Median income: $52,407 Trumbull County, Ohio, demographics: Population 203,341 How county voted in 44% White Republican Trumbull County Hillary Clinton 79.60% 12.10% 3.60% 0.10% 2.00% 0% 2.30% 69.75% 87.40% 8.20% 1.70% 0.20% 0.50% 0% 2% County voter turn out in 2012 Unemployment rate in June 2019: Donald Trump 50.2% County voter turn out in 2016 67.29% White Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races 6.10% Median income: $45,380 LORDSTOWN, OHIO “Gun rights, you’ve got these guys that want to be girls, girls that want to be guys,” Brown said, ticking off the reasons for Trump’s cultural appeal. “He’s trying to make the US a better place; he’s trying to build that wall,” Himes said, who said she and her brother were Americans, “born and raised here.” “Everybody has a right to be here, a good job, and be safe, but not when it takes away from our privileges,” she said. The new contract brought more bad news to those still holding out hope GM would reopen the plant. Members of the union chapter here, Local 1112, decisively rejected it, according to a local news report, but it passed nationwide. In a statement, GM said it was “moving forward with opportunities for future investments” in the Mahoning Valley, including a possible new battery plant and the sale of the old facility to another company, but no one expects those moves to result in as many well-paying jobs as there used to be. Right now, whether they work for the plant, many people’s anger is directed in only one direction: GM. On the picket line and in the union hall here, jobless and displaced workers from the plant complained they had made concessions to keep the company afloat during its bankruptcy in 2009, and then watched as the automaker invested billions of dollars in production in Mexico. ‘You have billions in profit last year and you’re still crying the blues.’ Russell Dunsmoor “We did everything they wanted us to,” said Jim Barnhart, a former forklift driver, who was set to transfer to a new GM job in Bowling Green. “They only answer to themselves and the stockholders.” That anger flowed beyond the picket line to a car show in the parking lot of Lordstown’s Dairy Queen. “How much is enough?” asked Russell Dunsmoor, 67, a retired technician for a phone company, who was showing a 1983 Chevy Camaro at the show. “You have billions in profit last year and you’re still crying the blues.” “I blame it on Wall Street,” Dunsmoor said. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 41 CITY HERE United Auto Worker Retirees Chairman Bill Bowers talked with Mike Deoerio, left, at the UAW Local 1112 union hall in Lordstown. Democratic candidates have railed against the same thing, especially in this presidential primary. But Dunsmoor, a Republican who has voted Democratic — including for Obama in 2008 — said he backed Trump in 2016 and was likely to do so again. Democrats are still trying to stoke anger at Trump. The state party printed lawn signs showing the president’s face and the words, “It doesn’t really matter,” which is a reference to an interview last year in which Trump said Ohio would replace Lordstown’s jobs in “like two minutes.” During the first week of the strike, that sign was leaning in the corner of a union conference room in Sandusky, Ohio, several hours west of Lordstown, which has its own shuttered factory. But there, too, few people held Trump responsible for the plant closures that came and the manufacturing boom that has not. “I don’t think things have gotten better here under Trump,” said Tim Schwanger, a former employee of the plant who voted for him 2016, and said he was open to doing so again. “I cannot vote for a socialist government,” he said. 42 LORDSTOWN, OHIO Jeff Ferrell, a trustee for the nearby township of Perkins, said Democrats did not seem to be doing enough to tap into the area’s populist angst. “When you watch the Democratic debate, how much do you hear about the American workers? That’s the Democratic Party,” he said. “If they’re not talking about it, who is?” Back on the picket lines in Lordstown last month, amid the piles of wood, Styrofoam coolers, and cases of water — the supplies needed to dig in for a long strike — many workers said they were fighting for their own rights, for something divorced from politics. Retired auto worker Buck Hornberger, right, picketed outside the GM plant in Lordstown. Hornberger worked at the plant for 31 years and was there to support “the people who lost their jobs here. I want the corporations to succeed because that benefits me. But it’s not fair if I only get a quarter raise and they get 8 billion. That doesn’t benefit me.” Barnhart, the forklift driver, stood out in front of the plant as a man in a passing truck called out, “Be tough!” and released a cloud of vape smoke from the window. “We know this is our last stand, basically,” said Barnhart, who voted for a third-party candidate instead of Clinton or Trump in 2016, and said he wouldn’t link himself to a political party ever again. “Where were these people,” he asked, “when we needed them?” BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 43 SCENES FROM Ohio Paul Krause woke up after sleeping on the bandstand outside the Trumbull County Courthouse in Warren. Krause said he has been unemployed since 2010 and homeless for few months. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Carol Kuchta worked on the pumpkin patch at her family’s farm in Newton Falls. Her husband, Dennis, said they are struggling to sell the soybeans and corn they grow. “We have things that we planted that aren’t worth anything.” Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Corn at a farm in Zanesville. Craig F. Walker/ Globe Staff Walkers passed the Floodwall Murals in Portsmouth. The murals, by Robert Dafford, depict the history of the city. Craig F. Walker/ Globe Staff Next Page: Morning fog began to lift over the U.S. Grant Bridge in Portsmouth. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Dorset lambs and ewes stood in their pen at Dorsets N Daylilies farm in Zanesville. Owner Kirsten Hatfield said the family farm raises sheep and angus cows, and grows feed and seed. She says they have been successful because, “we’re diversified. You have to be diversified, hopefully they won’t all fail at the same time.” Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Damauri Johnson, 9, used his homemade fishing rod on the Ohio River as the sun sets in Portsmouth. His father, Chris Johnson, said the family was fishing for, “whatever bites.” Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Chidlren in the Kingdom Soccer program battled for the ball in Portsmouth. The Cornerstone Church offers the program to children in pre-K through second grade. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff 44 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO — OCT. 20, 2019 Here, the opioid crisis is bigger than politics. As rehab centers replace pill mills, an Ohio River city fights back BY JAZMINE ULLOA PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG F. WALKER Dale King rumbled into the parking lot in his military Jeep, a black 1940s-style clunker that he maneuvered with a skull-tipped stick shift. Heavy metal music blasted from the garage that he and some friends had converted to a gym for the neighboring addiction center. Patients from next door were packed inside wearing worn T-shirts, faded athletic gear, and other hand-me-downs. Half the class were barefoot. Some wore jeans, others ankle monitors. It was October 2018, and King, a 38-year-old retired Army intelligence officer turned fitness trainer, characteristically got straight to the point. “Who here has overdosed?” Every hand in the room went up. “So, clearly you are not afraid to die?” A few nodded back in agreement. “Well, if you’re not afraid to die, don’t be afraid to go all out in this class,” he shouted. “Don’t be afraid to live.” He barely noticed the young man with a wrestler’s build in the back. 46 CITY HERE For years, King’s hometown here on the banks of the Ohio River was so ravaged by opioid abuse that it earned the notorious moniker of America’s Pill Mill. Governors and congressional leaders, Democrats and Republicans poured money into drug investigations and rehabilitation in attempts to lift Portsmouth and similarly hit communities in Ohio. The opioid crisis hit home with Shawn Hanshaw and his girlfriend, who live on the east side of Portsmouth. Hanshaw has been trying to help her kick her heroin and fentanyl addiction. Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 on the promise to build a wall along the nation’s southern border and renew American manufacturing in places like this. That helped him win Ohio comfortably by capturing the anxieties and frustrations of white blue-collar workers and rural voters worried about changing demographics and a stagnant economy. He also pledged to address the opioid crisis that hit hard across this state. That vow in particular resonated in and around Portsmouth. Trump carried Scioto County, where Portsmouth is located, with around 65 percent of the vote — some 15 percentage points better than Republican BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 47 CITY HERE Dale King, owner of the Portsmouth Spartan Kettlebell Club, drove his 1946 Jeep though downtown. Mitt Romney when he nipped former President Barack Obama here four years earlier. While much of the country is divided over Trump and his policies, some here credit him with calling attention to the opioid crisis. Still, many people working on the issue would rather avoid talking about Trump or the 2020 election altogether, fearful the polarized climate could endanger bipartisan local and state efforts. And those at the heart of the matter — people working through addiction — say they are simply focused on the daily act of living and trying to stay clean. But as King prepared to open the new gym, there were few signs that all the government money and political rhetoric had made much of a difference in this rural Appalachian region that many saw as the epicenter of the national opioid crisis. 48 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO Portsmouth stubbornly remained one more washed-up Rust Belt city with a sad story, known for its abandoned factories and bygone days when the United States used to make a lot of things. To King, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, the situation reminded him of his time in Baghdad amid a mounting insurgency. “Help wasn’t coming,” he said. “We were on our own.” And so, he and a group of fitness instructors, rehab counselors, and businesspeople decided to try a new strategy: addiction recovery meets CrossFit, the hard-core exercise regimen that has a cult-like status around the country. The self-funded venture would become part of a larger effort to turn the city around. All through the dog days of summer, they oversaw the transformation of The Counseling Center’s old garage into a gym. By the time King pulled up in his Jeep last fall, the space was outfitted with the sparse essentials: blue mats, weights and kettlebells, and a Bluetooth speaker. King carried himself with the confidence of a soldier. He was the owner of three successful businesses, including a fitness center down the street, PSKC CrossFit, and a line of “combat-ready” ointments and essential oils that landed him and his business partner on the television reality show “Shark Tank.” In the first class that morning, Andrew Wright was shy and didn’t talk to anyone. Six months before, he had been sleeping in libraries, avoiding friends he couldn’t help but disappoint, and picking up felonies. He didn’t know a thing about CrossFit. The city of Portsmouth is on the Ohio River. But in King, he saw who he wanted to become. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 49 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO Stay long enough in Portsmouth and someone is sure to mention “Dreamland.” Named after a massive swimming pool in town where many spent their summers, the 2015 book by Sam Quinones chronicled how the opioid crisis led to the decline of this once-booming community. Portsmouth still has the look of an all-American city, a picturesque place of 20,300 tucked along the Ohio River, with a quaint downtown of low-slung brick buildings, old factories, and white church steeples set against lush, green hills. But the scars from its illegal pill mills — up to 12 at one time — run deep. A bicyclist passed an abandoned building in Portsmouth. Doctors from around the United States cycled through the county to see patients. Most accepted only cash. Some even had their own pharmacies. There were no checks on who could run the facilities, no requirement they have a medical background. It was how one physician, Margo Temporas, managed to dispense more than 1.6 million pills. Or how Dr. Paul Volkman led the nation in prescribing the painkiller Oxycodone. Sergeant John Koch was a young detective with the Scioto County Sheriff ’s Office, busting mom-and-pop meth labs in the hills, when the long lines of people waiting outside the “pain clinics” captured his attention around 2004. Until then, he had only ever heard of Oxycodone being prescribed for severe chronic pain associated with terminal cancer. Now it seemed anyone could obtain it for a broken shoulder or injured back — no medical examinations necessary. “It was being handed out like candy,” he 50 CITY HERE said. “Officers knew there was an opioid crisis in Southern Ohio before any politician in the state called it that.” He and other investigators successfully worked to shut down the clinics, struggling with few resources to gather evidence on cases that spanned cities and states and were difficult to prove. How do you convince a jury that a doctor handing out legal drugs is engaging in a crime? Christian Ray (left) and Rodney Hatch loaded weights on bars during Dale King’s CrossFit class at the Health and Wellness Center at The Counseling Center. The fitness class is part of the recovery program. But as the last pain clinic closed in 2011, prices for pills rose. Then new scourges arrived. Heroin, fentanyl, and crystal meth, or “ice,” flooded the market, supplied by Mexican drug cartels, and shipped in by dealers from Dayton, Columbus, and Detroit. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 51 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO “I’d like to say that being involved in the takedown of the pill mills was satisfying,” Koch said. “And it was, it really was. But for guys that had worked narcotics back then — fellow narc officers across the state — we knew what was coming.” ‘Officers knew there was an opioid crisis in Southern Ohio before any politician in the state called it that.’ Sergeant John Koch The synthetic opioids were deadlier. This time, there were no gram amounts printed on pill bottles. People had no idea how much heroin they were consuming or whether fentanyl was laced in, and the overdoses piled up. Places like Portsmouth with high levels of economic distress saw the greatest amount of opioid use. King missed the worst of it. He left for the Army in 1999 and returned in 2007 to what looked to him like another war zone: the set of “The Walking Dead,” all shuttered businesses and billboards for pain clinics. “What the [expletive] is a pain clinic?” he wondered. “There was a dark feeling of despair,” King recalled. “People had zero belief, zero hope that anything would ever change.” He tried to ignore the problem, taking up work as a defense contractor, and later cofounding a fitness center and program with a friend who had lost a leg in Afghanistan. They dubbed it “Team Some Assembly Required.” The experience inspired him to open his own gym in 2014 in an abandoned auto shop. Portsmouth Spartan Kettlebell Club — named after the city’s 1930s NFL team that later was sold and became the Detroit Lions — is a brick building painted black and military green, with the words “Portsmouth Strong” emblazoned in white. Out of the same place, King founded his ointment line, DocSpartan, and a clothing line, “Third and Court,” named after the cross streets of its location. King remembers his own struggles after returning from the war, missing the camaraderie of military life and wallowing in a general lack of purpose. In those early days of PSKC, he would stare out the window and couldn’t help but feel angry at the men and women shuffling down the wide, empty, downtown streets to the nearby counseling center. He had made a choice to never use hard drugs and built a life after Iraq. He’d find himself thinking, “Why can’t they just get their [expletive] lives together?” 52 BY THE NUMBERS Ohio Demographics: Population 11,609,756 How state voted in 2016 Hillary Clinton 43.56% Donald Trump 51.69% State voter turn out in 2016 How state voted in 2012 71.33% Barack Obama Mitt Romney 50.67% 47.69% Democrat Other State voter turn out in 2012 70.54% How county voted in 2012 Barack Obama Mitt Romney 47.2% 48.5% Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races Unemployment rate in June 2019: 4% Median income: $52,407 City of Portsmouth, Ohio, demographics: Population 20,343 How county voted in 29% White Republican Scioto County Hillary Clinton 79.60% 12.10% 3.60% 0.10% 2.00% 0% 2.30% 67.94% 88.90% 5.60% 1.20% 0.50% 1.30% 0% 2.10% County voter turn out in 2012 Unemployment rate in June 2019: Donald Trump 65.2% County voter turn out in 2016 67.29% White Black Hispanic/Latino American Indian/Alaska native Asian Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Two or more races 6.10% Median income: $27,943 SOURCE: State of Ohio, Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 53 CITY HERE Shawn Hanshaw talked with a friend outside his home on the east side of Portsmouth. The home next-door is abandoned; he said people use the empty house to do drugs. President Trump declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency soon after he took office, and this September, he touted the passage of bipartisan legislation that earmarks nearly $3 billion in federal funding to better track overdoses, intercept fentanyl at the border, and provide money to state rehab programs. In Ohio, the aggressive efforts started long before. When Republican John Kasich became governor in 2011, he assembled multiple state agencies to crack down on drug trafficking, expanded services under the Affordable Care Act, and poured millions of dollars into prevention and recovery. Republican Mike DeWine, who as attorney general had worked to shut down the pill mills years earlier, continued the push when he succeeded Kasich as governor this year. The attention and funds over the past decade marked a cultural shift in the approach to the addiction crisis as it seeped into almost every facet of life. Emergency responders grappled with overdoses and injuries. Children with 54 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO addicted parents overwhelmed the foster care system. People shuffled in and out of jails. In Portsmouth, the pain clinics that once dotted city corners were replaced with roughly a dozen rehab centers, their billboards now advertising addiction treatment medication such as Suboxone. Some residents saw glimmers of hope in businesses like King’s slowly moving into downtown. Revitalization efforts also started to take hold as state dollars flowed in and county and city officials, law enforcement officers, and community leaders mounted their own initiatives to decriminalize drug use, improve mental health treatment, and clean up condemned and foreclosed homes that attracted illegal activity. But homeless and drug-addled people continued to congregate around blighted buildings last fall. Bill Dever, a lawyer and member of King’s gym, had represented many clients with addiction issues before becoming the head counsel for The Counseling Center, and was concerned there was little oversight on this new “rehabilitation gold rush.” Many centers churned out addiction treatment meds — which Dever agreed were needed — but offered few, if any, programs to integrate people back into society or provide them with housing, work, or life skills. Dever and a coordinator at the center approached King with an idea for a fitness program that would help people in recovery develop the strength and willpower to resist returning to old habits. “Everybody that’s running for office has an answer and a solution — and it’s all this [expletive],” Dever said. Joe Barnes, 26, worked out during Dale King’s CrossFit class at the Health and Wellness Center at The Counseling Center in Portsmouth. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 55 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO King, too, felt he could not look his children in the eye if he refused to help. Here, after all, was the sense of purpose and duty he had yearned for after he left the military. “I had an opportunity to do something or do nothing and let people die because I thought I was better than them,” King said. Andrew Wright, now 31, came in as part of the first pilot group. He worked so hard he soon drew the attention and respect of King, who dubbed him “Ninja Turtle.” ‘To be able to push through something, when I really physically feel like I’m not going to make it but I do, made me realize how strong like I really am’ Andrew Wright Wright had been a star high school wrestler in a nearby town. But he got kicked off the team after he failed AP calculus his senior year. He broke up with his girlfriend a month later, and soon after that she told him she was pregnant. The revelation, in turn, strained Wright’s relationship with his own mother. He soon left home and started taking opioid pills. When those got too expensive, he switched to heroin. The next 15 years were a blur. He graduated from Marine boot camp only to be thrown out of the military a few months later after testing positive for cocaine. He had a second child with another girlfriend. He said he cycled through jails and 14 recovery centers and programs but not once was sober for longer than four months. The Counseling Center downtown has roughly 260 clients at a time in 60to 90-day treatment programs. Some check themselves in or are brought by friends and family. Others, such as Wright, are ordered there by criminal court judges. That first day of CrossFit was brutal — an onslaught of instruction in the proper techniques for air squats, sit-ups, and pullups. Wright said he felt like so many of the other patients in the class: broken. Yet moving through the exercises also felt like the release of so much pent-up pain and frustration. As they plunged into heavy metal workouts, rehab patients challenged each other to keep coming back and competed with other classes for better scores. 56 CITY HERE “To be able to push through something, when I really physically feel like I’m not going to make it but I do, made me realize how strong . . . I really am,” Wright recalled. Andrew Wright listened during a morning staff meeting at the Portsmouth Spartan Kettlebell Club. Near the end of his 90-day treatment program, Wright, like so many others, planned to move to a homeless shelter to wait for transitional housing to open up. When King found this out, he offered him a job at PSKC, bottling and packaging DocSpartan ointments. Wright spent as much time as he could at the fitness center to avoid the shelter, where his roommate and so many others were still hooked on meth and other drugs. On Thanksgiving, when PSKC was closed, Dever told Wright to text him every hour so they could make sure he was OK. Every hour, Wright sent a text saying he was. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 57 CITY HERE Levi Kirschner (left) and Charles Lemon worked on a brick wall in a building being refurbished by the Workforce Development Team, run by Tim Wolfe in downtown Portsmouth. Both are recovering from opioid addiction. Along the Ohio River, a mural covers the length of a 20-foot floodwall. Downtown Portsmouth now has quaint shops; abandoned houses that once were drug dens have been razed, the lots now green with neatly trimmed grass. The economic recovery helped with local revitalization efforts, but there’s debate here over how much progress has been made against the opioid crisis. Deadly overdoses have dropped, but emergency responders say that could be because the state has made cans of Naloxone, or Narcan, more readily available. Spray the treatment drug in a person’s nose as they overdose, and chances are they live. But many still go on using. Discussing politics here is a delicate matter, and Police Chief Robert Ware, who works closely with state officials on opioid issues, tries to walk a middle line. His fear, he said, is not so much who is in the White House, but how far the political pendulum will swing in either direction. 58 PORTSMOUTH, OHIO “There’s some progressive ideologies or agendas that are really good, and there might be conservative ones that are really good,” he said. “But as that pendulum swings back and forth, I feel like we are going to lose the ability to grab from each side.” King, Dever, and their crew try to center their efforts on changing attitudes among their friends and families toward those with addiction problems. Some would rather see them locked up. Others worry the growing recovery industry is drawing people from across Ohio who end up staying in Portsmouth, ratcheting up drug-related crime. The CrossFit program has expanded into a job training initiative as King has hired more rehab patients at his company. The typical tourist stop in Portsmouth, locals say, is to get photos of the giant, 19th-century factory that was once home to the largest shoelace manufacturer in the country. Barely noticed is the business next door, Graf Custom Hardwood, which ships tables and chairs around the world and is now hiring workers from The Counseling Center. So is developer Tim Wolfe, whose restaurant, Patties and Pints, two blocks from King’s gym, quickly became a favorite hangout of PSKC members. Wolfe also served in Afghanistan and returned to find former high school friends in the throes of addiction. “Prom kings, football stars, people I thought were going to go on to do great things,” said Wolfe. Now, he is training recovering addicts in construction and restoration; on any given morning, a handful of workers can be found preparing to gut a building on empty downtown streets. The rebuilding process is spreading. One Sunday late this summer, King, Dever, Wolfe, and several crew members met up early and took a van along winding country roads, past horses and giant Trump signs, to a sister Counseling Center site in Scioto County, where they transformed another garage into a CrossFit gym. King helped lay black mats and assemble the poles for the rigs and pullup stations. ‘There’s some progressive ideologies or agendas that are really good, and there might be conservative ones that are really good. But as that pendulum swings back and forth, I feel like we are going to lose the ability to grab from each side.’ Police Chief Robert Ware The gym opened in late summer, and the head coach was Andrew Wright. BACK TO THE BATTLEGROUND 59 Michigan East Grand Rapids, MI: Impeachment is the political line of scrimmage for a Michigan suburb in flux Page: 62 Madison Heights, MI: They helped Trump win Michigan, then he split their community Page: 74 Port Huron, MI: What happened after a young Trump voter in Michigan transformed into a vegan AOC fan Page: 88 60 Hundreds of classic cars lined the main street of Fenton during the days leading up to the 15th annual Back to the Bricks Festival in Flint, Mich., in August. Erin Clark for the Boston Globe Hm xo