Jobless white Democrats line up behind Trump read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/721-jobless-white-democrats-line-up-behind-trump

In economically struggling communities like Mahoning County where most steel mills have closed many white working-class Democrats are voting for Trump, registration records and 2016 presidential primary results show.

According to a November 2015 Public Religion Research Institute poll, 72 percent of Americans and 78 percent of white working-class Americans believe the country still is in a recession.

In Mahoning County, Ohio, as its county seat Youngstown labors under the loss of the steel industry, more than 6,000 voters have moved from Democrat to Republican this year.

Similarly, frustrated over closing steel mills and rising health care costs has moved backward nearly 5,400 voters to switch parties in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.

Miller, the Mahoning County chairwoman for Trump, said Americans should forget politicians. Trump appeals to her because he’s a businessman, and Trump’s business background will create jobs and improve the economy.

And in one Kentucky County where residents frustrated with the demolition of the coal industry voted about 31 percent Republican in the 2000 presidential election, they voted more than 72 percent Republican in 2012, even though a majority of its voters remain registered Democrats.

Forty years after its steel mills closed, Youngstown’s poverty rate is just over 40 percent.

The county worked to recover from the loss, and logging is now a valued industry in the heavily forested area. Log trucks pass through the small downtown several times an hour.

Unemployment in Clay County, which is nearly 97 percent white, has petered out to a little more than 5 percent in May 2016, just over the May national average of 4.7 percent.

In the Rust Belt of Ohio and Pennsylvania, steel was the dominant industry. But as steel companies outsourced their labor to mills in China, voters also grew frustrated with the job loss.

As coal became more scarce and expensive to mine in eastern Kentucky, coal companies moved to states such as Montana and Wyoming, where the work is easier and cheaper. The companies also started to use advanced mining technology, eliminating the need for a large number of miners.

Nearly 90 percent of registered voters in Knott County, which is 98 percent white, are Democrats because it’s what their families have been for generations.

 

Nearly 34 percent of the county’s residents live below the poverty line. In May, the unemployment rate was 10.5 percent.