{"id":238,"date":"2016-07-23T16:43:30","date_gmt":"2016-07-23T16:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wmreadinganthology\/?post_type=chapter&p=238"},"modified":"2016-07-23T16:46:31","modified_gmt":"2016-07-23T16:46:31","slug":"the-great-republican-crack-up","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-wm-readinganthology\/chapter\/the-great-republican-crack-up\/","title":{"raw":"The Great Republican Crack-up","rendered":"The Great Republican Crack-up"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n

By\u00a0Alec MacGillis<\/p>\r\n

Published July 15, 2016 by ProPublica<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

L<\/span>AST SEPT. 2,<\/span> Don Phillips sat down at his desk at the Mandalay banquet hall along the interstate just south of Dayton, Ohio, and composed an angry letter to the congressman from the adjoining district, the highest-ranking elected Republican in the country, then-House Speaker John Boehner.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Dear John:<\/blockquote>\r\n
What has Congress done to solve any of these problems that affect all Americans? \u2026 What\u2019s going on with the Republicans? No wonder people are so interested in\u00a0TRUMP<\/strong>. Everyone is sick of electing politicians that do nothing and continue to go on vacations and work three days a week when the Country is in trouble. Congress needs to get in gear and do something to solve some of these problems.<\/blockquote>\r\nThe letter was, quite literally, a \u201cDear John\u201d break-up declaration. Phillips was once the picture of a Midwestern establishment Republican. He is a successful businessman who started out delivering food to the cafeterias and vending machines at the factories and tool-and-die shops that used to be all over Dayton. Thirty-two years ago, he built the Mandalay, the giant windowless catering hall on I-75, between the industrial park and the for-profit college. He has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. His upstairs office, where elevator music is piped in on the Mandalay\u2019s audio system, has pictures of himself with George H.W. Bush on the walls, a Bush commemorative golf putter leaning against the shelves, and a copy of Karl Rove\u2019s latest book on his desk. There is a framed certificate from 1981 declaring Phillips a member of the \u201cSenate Business Advisory Board\u201d in \u201crecognition of his commitment to preserve and strengthen the American free enterprise system.\u201d For the past few years, Phillips even let the Montgomery County Republican Party use a room at the Mandalay for its headquarters.\r\n\r\nHe had known Boehner for three decades \u2014 had considered him a friend, had attended his golf tournaments. Yet the time for the break had come.\r\n
Whatever the reason you cannot do what needs to be done to lead your party, the American people need to step up to the plate and get people in Washington that can do the job, whether we are talking about the President, Congress or your job.<\/blockquote>\r\n
Can you name any major accomplishment that has been achieved for the American people since you have been Speaker? Everyone we know is disappointed in what is going on with the Congress.<\/blockquote>\r\nThree weeks after Phillips sent the letter, Boehner announced his resignation. While Phillips was under no illusions that his letter had played a part in Boehner\u2019s decision, he saw his own discontent with the party leadership as part of a swelling dissent that had, by that point, upended the Republican presidential campaign. In 2012, Phillips had supported Mitt Romney in the primaries. Yet this year, the man who housed the Republican establishment in his own building was supporting the man running against it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI feel very good about Trump. I\u2019m for Trump 100 percent. I\u2019m a Trump man and a lot of my family are Trump,\u201d he said. His wife, Cay, who often handles the Mandalay\u2019s front desk, had been wary of Donald Trump because of \u201csome of the things he was saying,\u201d but then she read Trump\u2019s latest book and changed her mind. \u201cHe really knows what he\u2019s doing,\u201d Don Phillips said. \u201cHe\u2019ll put people around him. He has no obligations to Washington. Washington is broken. I definitely feel Trump is the answer to America.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe disruption that the nomination of Trump represents for the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan has been cast as a freakish anomaly, the equivalent of the earthquakes that hit the other side of Ohio in recent years. But just as those earthquakes had a likely explanation \u2014 gas and oil fracking in the Utica Shale \u2014 so can the crackup of the Republican Party and rise of Trump be traced back to what the geologists call the local site conditions.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s no secret the country has sorted itself into ever-more polarized camps. What is underappreciated is how much that dynamic has played out even within regions, even within a single relatively small metropolitan area like Dayton. The city along the Great Miami River, an hour north of Cincinnati, was once a bastion of moderation and heterodoxy, the sort of place where the spectrum was jumbled with conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans and everything in between. But a combination of trends \u2014 among them suburban flight, deindustrialization, the flip of the Solid South to Republicans \u2014 changed everything.\r\n\r\n
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Don Phillips was for Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries and housed the local Republican Party at his banquet hall, the Mandalay. But this year, he was for Trump. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>By 2016, the Dayton area consisted of an urban core greatly diminished in stature yet also increasingly assertive in its liberalism, to the degree that it had even made itself into a national poster child for tolerance toward immigrants. Meanwhile, Dayton\u2019s outlying areas were both home to a much larger share of the region\u2019s people and commerce and to a conservatism that was far more strident and monolithic than anything the area had known in decades past. Caught in the middle, in a political no man\u2019s land, were people who were at home in neither realm, descendants of conservative Democrats who had drifted from that party as it grew more culturally liberal and coastally oriented, yet who had formed only a tenuous connection with Republicans, one based more on grievance than ideology.\r\n\r\nBoth parties had been transformed, but such was the nature of the realignment that in 2016, it was the Republican Party that suffered a crackup. For decades, Dayton has been one of the most competitive cities in one of the most competitive states in the country. In 2012, when Barack Obama narrowly won Ohio, he took Montgomery County, in which Dayton sits, by only 3 percentage points, making it the most closely contested of Ohio\u2019s half-dozen biggest urban counties. This year, Dayton became a bellwether once again: When Ohio Republicans went to the polls<\/a> in March to pick their nominee, of the nine largest counties in the state, Montgomery County was where Donald Trump fared best.\r\n\r\nThe stresses that created these Trump voters had been building for decades in places like Dayton. For the most part, the political establishment ignored, dismissed or overlooked these forces, until suddenly they blew apart nearly everyone\u2019s blueprint for the presidential campaign.\r\n

\u201cYou brought everyone else along with\u00a0you.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nIn 1971, another letter to another Republican congressman from Ohio: Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to William McCulloch to wish him well on his retirement from the House of Representatives. This was not something that former first ladies did often \u2014 especially to members of the opposing party \u2014 but McCulloch was a special case. \u201cYou, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThere were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill, without appearing to do so, but you never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone else along with you.\u201d\r\n\r\n
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Rep. William McCulloch in his Washington office on Sept. 11, 1963. (Bob Schutz\/AP Photo)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>There was little exaggeration in this praise. McCulloch, a country lawyer from tiny Piqua<\/a>, just north of Dayton, was a conservative in the Old Guard mold that had defined Ohio Republicanism since Robert Taft: fiscally prudent, wary of foreign entanglement, even-keeled to the point of stodgy. He wore red suspenders, returned a portion of his congressional office allowance each year and forswore spending pork for his district. He supported gun ownership and school prayer and opposed many social welfare programs. But he was also the proud descendant of abolitionists and had goaded President John F. Kennedy into pushing forward on civil rights and had then played a leading role in seeing the legislation home after Kennedy\u2019s assassination. \u201cTo do less,\u201d he said, \u201cwould be to shirk our responsibility as national legislators and as human beings who honor the principles of liberty and justice.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn this, McCulloch was no outlier among fellow Ohio Republicans. The state leaned Republican back then \u2014 in 1960, Richard Nixon had beaten Kennedy in the state by 5 points, almost exactly the margin of victory he got in bellwether Montgomery County. Eighteen of the state\u2019s 24 congressional seats were held by Republicans in 1963 and 1964. And of them, all but one voted for the Civil Rights Act<\/a>, putting Ohio Republicans in a class of their own in supporting the bill. (All told, 136 House Republicans voted yea, and 35 nay.) The state had, after all, long prided itself on its history as a beacon of liberty: cross the Ohio River from Kentucky and you were free. It had lost the third-most men on the Union side of the Civil War, and its political culture shared quite a bit with Yankee New England, from which many of its early inhabitants had moved, especially in the state\u2019s northern half.\r\n\r\nMcCulloch\u2019s mantle as Republican civil rights champion was soon assumed by Dayton\u2019s own congressman, Charles Whalen. Urbane and cerebral \u2014 he attended Harvard Business School before becoming an executive at the Dayton Dress Company and teaching economics at the University of Dayton \u2014 Whalen was the author of Ohio\u2019s fair-housing law in the state Legislature. He carried that commitment to Washington after he was elected to Congress in 1966 and, years later, wrote a book on the passage of the Civil Rights Act. He defied easy categorization: He vocally opposed the Vietnam War, but was also critical of War on Poverty programs and, as a Roman Catholic, opposed Roe v. Wade<\/em>. \u201cI have always been amused,\u201d he once wrote<\/a>, \u201cwhen pundits refer to a Congressman as \u2018liberal\u2019 for voting against $150 billion of waste in Vietnam and another Congressman as \u2018conservative\u2019 when he voted for it.\u201d Ideological diversity, he said, is \u201cbeneficial in that it provides the Party not only with the vitality necessary to keep astride of current political tides, but also the restraint that is helpful in making far-reaching decisions.\u201d\r\n\r\nMcCulloch and Whalen\u2019s self-confident moral authority was undergirded by the solidity and prosperity of their home base. For decades, Dayton had been an exemplar of American capitalism and ingenuity \u2014 back when America not only invented things but still made the things it invented, Dayton did a lot of both. In 1890, it generated more patents per capita than any other city<\/a> \u2014 there were the Wright Brothers and their bicycle shop, of course, but also James Ritty, the saloonkeeper who invented the mechanical cash register to keep his employees from pilfering dough, and John Patterson, who transformed Ritty\u2019s invention into the National Cash Register company, and Charles Kettering, the engineer who turned Ritty\u2019s creation electric. The sound of Dayton in these years was, literally, ka-ching<\/em>. The Third National Bank was finished with imported marble and mahogany woodwork; patrons did their business at bronze check desks. Local hotels included the Biltmore and the Algonquin \u2014 the aspirations were transparent, and not unjustified.\r\n\r\nKettering went on to found the auto parts giant Delco, where he developed the electrical starting motor and leaded gasoline, plus side ventures with DuPont and others to invent Freon and colored paint for cars. In the postwar years, Dayton had a higher concentration of auto workers than anywhere outside of Michigan<\/a>. The city swelled with new arrivals in search of work \u2014 not just African-Americans on the Great Migration, but Scots-Irish up from Kentucky and Tennessee. By 1960, Dayton was still one of the 50 largest cities in the country \u2014 bigger than Charlotte, Tucson and Austin.\r\n\r\nBut as Whalen\u2019s tenure carried into the 1970s, changes were underway. As elsewhere, the arrival of Southern blacks had been answered with white flight. In 1930, nearly three-quarters of Montgomery County\u2019s population lived in Dayton, but half a century later, that share had plummeted to less than a third. They had moved to working-class inner suburbs like Miamisburg and Huber Heights, tight-knit communities with modest, well-kept frame houses and bungalows, and more upscale Oakwood or Beavercreek, which was just across the line into Greene County. The city that remained was the second-most racially segregated of Ohio\u2019s eight largest<\/a>. And the Appalachian migrants had added a more conservative element to the area\u2019s political landscape.\r\n\r\nMidway through President Nixon\u2019s first term, he had been hooked by the 1970 book The Real Majority<\/em><\/a>, which argued that the classic swing voter was the \u201c47-year-old machinist\u2019s wife from Dayton.\u201d This voter tilted Democratic on economic issues, but Nixon and his adviser Pat Buchanan concluded that she could be won over by Republicans who stoked fears about welfare, school desegregation and crime. The irony was that the district with exactly the demographic being targeted by Nixon was<\/em> being represented throughout the 1970s by a Republican \u2014 one with an entirely different sort of politics than what Nixon envisioned.\r\n\r\nBut by 1978, Whalen was coming under increasing pressure from local Republicans fed up with his liberal bent. Facing a primary challenge, he announced his retirement. The Republican Party in southwest Ohio \u2014 as elsewhere \u2014 was becoming less northern, less urban, and less liberal. And the city he was born in and represented for a dozen years was headed for trouble.\r\n

\u201cPeople was\u00a0friendly.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nDon Phillips didn\u2019t know what to make of the people he called \u201cthe Russians.\u201d They were good for business, renting out the Mandalay for their big weddings. But they were different than his usual customers. The men and women sat separately inside the hall. And the men lived it up like nothing he\u2019d ever seen \u2014 dozens of bottles of vodka, hundreds of packs of cigarettes. The butts ended up in the flower pots outside. He\u2019d had to triple the $500 cleaning fee for them. No problem, they said. They just stacked more cash on the desk.\r\n\r\nWhere were they getting all that money? They were making it big in long-haul trucking. Dayton was a transport town \u2014 \u201clogistics,\u201d as the industry liked to call it \u2014 since it sat at the juncture of two major routes, I-75 and I-70. Half the population of the U.S. was within an 11-hour drive, something local boosters had taken to citing as a point of pride as so many of the city\u2019s other assets had fallen away. The \u201cRussians\u201d had gotten into the freight business soon after coming to town \u2014 after all, you didn\u2019t need fluent English to drive a truck. And now they were doing so well with it that some were driving sports cars around town \u2014 Porsches, Maseratis, you name it. Phillips couldn\u2019t figure how there was so much money in trucking, but he kept that to himself. \u201cWe\u2019re being nice to them,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not running them off, we\u2019re letting them come. But when they come they\u2019re going to behave just like anyone else.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe Russians were actually Turks \u2014 specifically, what are known as Ahiska Turks, descendants of people who had migrated north centuries ago. After the Soviet Union broke up, they faced frequent persecution as a Muslim minority in Russia, and in 2004, the U.S. granted them refugee status. Some 11,000 arrived in the U.S.<\/a> before the refugee status expired in 2007. And in the years that followed, a couple thousand of them gravitated to Dayton, because Dayton had become a good place for starting over with nothing.\r\n\r\nBy the time they arrived, Dayton\u2019s manufacturing industries had long been hollowing out<\/a>. Nearly half of the 20,000 jobs that existed in 1990 at five GM plants were gone by 2008, for example. Auto-parts maker Delphi, into which Kettering\u2019s Delco had been absorbed, dropped from 10,000 employees in the Dayton area in 2002 to a mere 800 by 2009. The papermaking giant Mead gave up its home base in Dayton in a 2001 merger.\r\n\r\nBut nothing hurt as much as the decline of NCR, as Patterson\u2019s company was now called, having long since expanded beyond cash registers to ATM machines, bar code scanners and software. Some 15,000 manufacturing jobs with NCR had vanished from the city even before the company announced in June 2009, barely past the lowest point of the recession, that it was moving its headquarters to Atlanta, complete with this graceless grace note from its CEO: \u201cWe had a very difficult time recruiting people to live and work in Dayton.\u201d\r\n\r\n
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Islom Shakhbandarov and other Ahiska Turks in Dayton have prospered in the long-haul freight business. They drive Porsches and Maseratis around town. And when they pay for their big weddings at the Mandalay, they pay with stacks of cash. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>Total despair was precluded only by the comforting presence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the edge of town. The city\u2019s population was 141,000, down by nearly half over the previous five decades and now just 183rd largest in the country. The broad streets of downtown, spreading out on the flat ground along the river, suddenly seemed too wide, too empty. The elegant Algonquin Hotel was now the discount Grand, where rooms went for under $100. And the median sales price for a home in the city was around $80,000, half the national average.\r\n\r\nThis made it appealingly affordable for the Ahiska Turks. At the same time, the city did not seem as far gone as other bargain-basement Rust Belt cities like Detroit or Youngstown. The Turks zeroed in on Old North Dayton<\/a>, which had once been heavily Eastern European. \u201cThe neighborhoods were decent, actually. Very decent. Not like really, really bad with huge crime rates,\u201d said Islom Shakhbandarov, the charismatic president of the local Ahiska Turkish American Community Center.\r\n\r\nBut there was something else about Dayton. \u201cPeople was friendly \u2014 unusually friendly,\u201d said Shakhbandarov. \u201cWe started spreading the word that Dayton was welcoming.\u201d\r\n

\u201cWe became aware of our\u00a0ignorance.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nChuck Whalen had been succeeded as Dayton\u2019s congressman by Tony Hall, a Democrat. Hall had grown up in a Republican family in town \u2014 his father ran a laundry \u2014 but he\u2019d joined the Peace Corps and had come back a Kennedy Democrat. While he had a different party affiliation than Whalen, he aspired to his example. \u201cThe Republican leadership was griping about how he was too liberal in some of his ways,\u201d Hall says, \u201cbut he was representing his district, and representing thoughtful ways to do things.\u201d\r\n\r\nSoon enough, Hall was having differences with his own party leadership. He could tell that many of his Democratic constituents \u2014 blue-collar workers, the proverbial machinists\u2019 wives \u2014 did not care much for the direction the national party was taking in the 1980s and \u201890s. In 1980, Montgomery County had been one of only two counties<\/a> in the entire central and western swath of Ohio that Jimmy Carter carried against Ronald Reagan. Eight years later, the county gave a substantially bigger margin<\/a> to George H.W. Bush than he received across the state. Hall\u2019s constituents were especially down on President Bill Clinton\u2019s promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement, he said. \u201cA lot of Democrats in the Midwest feel that they didn\u2019t leave the Democratic Party \u2014 they feel like the Democratic Party left them,\u201d he says. \u201cThey had basic desires and needs and wanted them to represent the working man.\u201d\r\n\r\nMany of the Democrats who had moved out to the more working-class suburbs of Dayton started voting Republican. That party had, after all, been making the sort of crime-and-welfare pitch that Nixon had envisioned in 1970 to appeal to these voters\u2019 conservative views on race and social issues. The drift among these voters from the Democratic Party accelerated with the wave of auto plant closings that started after 2000, Hall said. \u201cAs long as we had our 10 or 12 auto plants, we were pretty good, but we felt that the NAFTA deal made it a lot easier for companies to go to Mexico \u2014 and they did. They shut down our factories,\u201d says Hall. Voters just coming of age \u201csaw their Moms and Dads lose their jobs and they didn\u2019t think anyone did anything for them.\u201d\r\n\r\n
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In 1960, Dayton was one of the 50th biggest cities in the country. Since then, its population has fallen by nearly half and its rank has slipped to 183rd. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>As those Democrats had, over time, left Dayton for the suburbs and then left the party as well, the party they had left behind in the city had taken on a different character. By the late-2000\u2019s, Dayton was dominated by a staunchly liberal leadership cohort: an assortment of African-Americans (by this point Dayton was 43 percent black), activist-minded elected officials and bureaucrats, college professors, and other urbanite professionals who were doing their part to bring the city back \u2014 going to the theater, patronizing the growing bar and restaurant scene on East Fifth Street. And in 2011, this cohort decided to take up a very particular liberal cause: making the city more welcoming to immigrants and refugees.\r\n\r\nIt was, on its face, an unlikely issue to champion. The city had refugees other than the Turks (Africans, Iraqis) and had experienced an uptick in Mexican immigration starting in the late 1990s \u2014 people come to work in construction and fast food and the tomato farms north of the city \u2014 but its foreign-born population was only 4.5 percent of the total, barely above the statewide average. Still, word started to come of newcomers having difficulties \u2014 the Ahiska Turks were having run-ins with building inspectors as they renovated their homes; undocumented Hispanic immigrants weren\u2019t comfortable reporting robberies to the cops and were experiencing discrimination from landlords.\r\n\r\nTo Dayton\u2019s liberals, reports of troubles being encountered by new arrivals were a rebuke. \u201cWe became aware of our ignorance,\u201d said Tom Wahlrab, then-director of Dayton\u2019s Human Relations Council, a mediator by training who lived in a renovated townhouse in the city\u2019s historic Oregon District. \u201cWe said, what could we do with the community for welcoming these newcomers?\u201d\r\n\r\nDayton was becoming a small blue island \u2014 Obama won 76 percent of the city\u2019s vote in 2008, compared with only 44 percent in the rest of Montgomery County, a difference that had grown by 6 percentage points since 1980, when Jimmy Carter won 66 percent in the city and 40 percent in the rest of the county. The Republican sweep in the 2010 midterms, which had put the Ohio state government under total GOP control, had put a halt for the time being to any immediate prospects of reforming the nation\u2019s broken immigration laws or figuring out what to do with the 11 million undocumented people living in the shadows. Arizona and Alabama passed strict laws clamping down on illegal immigrants in 2010 and 2011.\r\n\r\nBut Dayton went in the opposite direction. There was a task force, subcommittees, and a series of \u201cconversations\u201d where residents turned out to talk about what Dayton could do for its new arrivals. There was a report that became an action plan<\/a> that called for, among other things, expanded interpretation services in courts, health care and government; a World Cup-style soccer tournament between immigrant groups to be held every fall; and the provision of a municipal ID card for those ineligible for a driver\u2019s license. Already, it was the policy of the city police not to spend limited resources trying to ferret out undocumented immigrants.\r\n\r\nA public hearing on the plan<\/a> in September 2011 attracted only three in opposition, anti-illegal immigrant activists from the Cleveland area. Nan Whaley, an Indiana native who stayed in Dayton after attending college and was elected to the city commission in 2005, spoke up for the plan: \u201cWe\u2019re recognizing that we\u2019ve had incredible population loss over the past 40 years, and that we\u2019re trying to redefine what an open city looks like.\u201d Two weeks later she and her fellow city commissioners approved the plan, 4-0.\r\n\r\nWelcome Dayton, as it was called, hired a director and two \u201cimmigration resource specialists.\u201d It added free tax assistance websites in different languages to help immigrants get their earned-income credits. It guided immigrants through the home-buying process. It held \u201ccommunity-building\u201d events called \u201cVoices\u201d where immigrants talked about their background. The orchestra had a Welcome Dayton weekend. The World Cup soccer tournament was a hit. Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrations drew hundreds more than in years prior. Nan Whaley, one of the leading champions of the initiative, was elected mayor in 2013. Just a few weeks earlier, the program had gotten the ultimate liberal affirmation: a spot on \u201cThe Daily Show.\u201d<\/a>\r\n\r\n
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Tom Wahlrab was the director of the city\u2019s Human Relations Council and a major force behind launching Welcome Dayton. \u201cWe became aware of our ignorance,\u201d he said. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

\u201cThey got\u00a0welfare.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nPhil Plummer was caught in the middle. The son of a city firefighter, he had grown up in Old North Dayton when it was still thriving and had, after starting out as a corrections officer, worked all the way up the ladder to be elected Montgomery County sheriff as a Republican in 2008. On the one hand, he didn\u2019t care much for Welcome Dayton, which smacked too much of making Dayton a \u201csanctuary city,\u201d much as city leaders rejected the term. \u201cThe intent was to welcome immigration \u2026 but it went a little too far and brought the illegals here,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve got a policy where police can\u2019t ask anyone their immigration status, and to me that\u2019s an indicator of a sanctuary city. If I can\u2019t ask you your immigration status, it\u2019s tough to enforce the law of the land.\u201d He also fretted about how much undocumented immigrants were costing the city. \u201cAre they paying taxes?\u201d he said. \u201cIt is<\/em> a burden to us \u2014 they are going to our schools.\u201d\r\n\r\nOn the other hand, he found it hard not to sympathize with the new arrivals. \u201cThey want an opportunity,\u201d he said, \u201csame as our ancestors did.\u201d He was in favor of reforming the nation\u2019s immigration laws. \u201cWe got to be honest with ourselves \u2014 they\u2019re not going to deport them,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething\u2019s got to be done \u2014 we got to quit kicking the can down the road.\u201d He even thought many of the immigrants would end up in his party: \u201cThey\u2019re Republicans. They have a good work ethic.\u201d Plummer\u2019s compassion got the better of him when he received calls from a local nun, Sister Maria Stacy, asking if she could visit undocumented immigrants being held at the jail. Sister Maria had been dispatched to Dayton in 2002 from her native Cincinnati to minister to the new immigrants there \u2014 organizing English classes, offering help in finding lawyers, and, yes, praying with them in jail when it came to that. \u201cShe\u2019s a little radical,\u201d Plummer said. \u201cBut we bend over backwards for her.\u201d\r\n\r\nPlummer\u2019s nuanced view was also in stark contrast with his counterpart just to the south, in Butler County. Butler was once mostly farmland surrounding a couple small market and manufacturing towns, Hamilton and Middletown, but over time had turned into an exurb to both Cincinnati and Dayton, tripling in population since 1940. Warren County, just to Butler\u2019s east, had once been even less developed and had grown almost tenfold over the same period as tract housing developments flared out across the former soybean fields. Their combined population had vaulted to 600,000 over the course of a half century when Montgomery\u2019s population had stayed flat at about 530,000.\r\n\r\n
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Sister Maria Stacy, here attending a quinceanera ceremony in Dayton, often seeks permission from the local sheriff to visit undocumented immigrants being held at the county jail. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>As they had grown, these exurbs had become the Republican bedrock in Ohio. When President Bush\u2019s 2004 reelection came down to Ohio, Butler went for him with 66 percent of its vote and Warren with 72 percent. In fact, those two counties plus two other Dayton exurbs, Greene and Miami counties, togetherprovided Bush\u2019s narrow 120,000-vote margin<\/a> of victory in the state.\r\n\r\nThese fast-growing counties had not only drawn the region\u2019s Republicans to them. By concentrating Republicans far from Democratic-dominated cities like Dayton, they seemed to change the very character of Ohio Republicanism from the strand embodied by congressmen like Bill McCulloch and Chuck Whalen. Maybe it had to with the political science<\/a> showing that the less densely settled a place was, the more likely it was to be politically conservative. Maybe it was the other effect<\/a> the political scientists talked about, how being surrounded<\/a> by people with similar politics tended to make one\u2019s politics more extreme.\r\n\r\nRegardless of the causes of the transformation, the fact was that part of McCulloch\u2019s former district, stretching north of Dayton, was now represented by Jim Jordan, an arch-conservative who would eventually become chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. The bulk of McCulloch\u2019s former district had been represented since the early 1990s by John Boehner. He was, by the standards of the day, considered relatively moderate. But by the time he became speaker of the House in 2011, his district had been shifting right for quite some time as well.\r\n\r\nNo one embodied this shift better than Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones, who was first elected in 2004. Jones looked like he\u2019d stepped out of a Western, with a hulking frame and exemplary walrus mustache, and, in a sense, fashioned himself as a frontier lawman. He made two trips to inspect the Mexican border. And he prides himself on his tough enforcement of immigration laws in his own territory. Jones\u2019 publicity stunts have included posting an \u201cIllegal Aliens Here\u201d sign<\/a> with an arrow pointing to his jail and sending the Mexican government a $900,000 bill for the cost of jailing illegal immigrants. These stunts earned him a spot of his own on \u201cThe Daily Show.\u201d<\/a> They also did nothing to hinder his easy reelection in 2008 and 2012.\r\n\r\nTo hear Jones tell it, Dayton was the end of the earth, the darkness to be guarded against. \u201cI tell anybody that\u2019s wanting to commit a crime here, if you\u2019re from another country, I tell them to go Dayton,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re fine. They give you free stuff. They want you to be there. They got welfare.\u201d\r\n\r\nBack in Dayton, Plummer viewed Jones\u2019 outspokenness with bemusement tinged with envy. \u201cHe\u2019s a crazy guy,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course, that\u2019s a big Republican area, so he can go out on a limb. This is a Democrat town, so I gotta\u2026 \u201d He trailed off, leaving the local political imperatives implied.\r\n\r\n
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Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones marches at the head of the Fourth of July parade in Middletown, Ohio. Jones has made a name for himself in opposing illegal immigration \u2014 once, he sent the Mexican government a $900,000 bill for immigrants he was housing at the county jail. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

\u201cGo ahead, knock yourself\u00a0out.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nButler County, Warren County, and the other growing exurbs were helping put the Republican Party in Montgomery County in dire straits. As suburbia had sprawled to the farther-out counties, taking the most engaged and wealthy conservatives with it, the party that was left in Dayton and its inner suburbs was bereft of resources and direction.\r\n\r\nThere were still plenty of people who voted Republican in the county \u2014 George W. Bush had barely lost it in 2004. Some of them were in the county\u2019s middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs, like Kettering and Oakwood. But many of the Bush voters were the blue-collar ex-Democrats of working-class suburbs like Miamisburg and Huber Heights. Vote as they might, their allegiance to the Republican Party \u2014 whether what remained of its moderate establishment in Dayton or the newer, more ideological vanguard in the exurbs \u2014 was limited.\r\n\r\nThis had left the Montgomery County Republican Party increasingly adrift. It had been led since 2006 by Greg Gantt, an amiable, mild-mannered Dayton lawyer. But fundraising was a constant struggle and around 2009, he started having to contend with a new coterie of Tea Party activists, mobilized by the conservative backlash against Obama. The ferment they brought into the party throughout the state helped fuel the party\u2019s big 2010 sweep of state offices, which in turn allowed it to control the decennial redistricting process. A year later, in 2012, Republicans would win 52 percent of the House vote in Ohio but 75 percent of the state\u2019s congressional seats<\/a>.\r\n\r\nAs time went on, though, these new activists also sought to block and second-guess Gantt at every turn. He found their claims to revolutionary status tiresome \u2014 it was as if they thought they were the first ones ever to propose different ways of doing party business. \u201cIt\u2019s fingernails on a chalkboard when I hear people talk about \u2018the establishment,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cWhat the hell is that \u2014 is there a secret meeting of all the people in the party?\u201d\r\n\r\nAlso complicating Gantt\u2019s task was the fact that, at the national level, the party had been for a while now been growing far more Southern-dominated as the realignment of Southern conservative Democrats into Republicans completed itself. It was George Voinovich, the former Ohio governor, who, just prior to his 2011 retirement from the Senate, had deplored the regional shift within his party. \u201cWe got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns,\u201d he said, referring to his arch-conservative colleagues from South Carolina and Oklahoma. \u201cIt\u2019s the Southerners \u2026 They get on TV and go \u2018errrr, errrrr.\u2019 People hear them and say, \u2018These people, they\u2019re Southerners. The party\u2019s being taken over by Southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?\u2019\u201d Voinovich reiterated this when I spoke with him in early April 2016, prior to his death in June. \u201cJim DeMint used to say, \u2018If you don\u2019t subscribe to his version of the Republican Party, you\u2019re not a really a Republican,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI used to tell him that a lot of things you subscribe to are like manure on the rug in Ohio.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn 2012, Gantt finally grew so tired of the challenge of maintaining his corner of the Ohio Republican Party that he ceded control to one of the new activists, a 30-year-old lawyer named Rob Scott. Scott was a Kettering native who had founded the Dayton Tea Party and served on the ballot committee for a statewide initiative to end Ohio\u2019s estate tax. \u201cThey thought everything we were doing was wrong and they knew everything,\u201d Gantt said. \u201cI was trying to make up my mind. I thought, if you are in charge of a divided house, how much fun is that going to be? I said, \u2018Rob, if you want it, you got it.\u2019 I sat down with them and said, \u2018It\u2019ll take me a year to go around and introduce you to the money people, to teach you everything I know.\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m done, but I\u2019ll hang around and show you the ropes,\u2019and they said, \u2018No we got it.\u2019 I said, \u2018Go ahead, knock yourself out.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nWithin a year and a half, Scott himself was gone, forced out<\/a> for poor performance in September 2013. The party\u2019s anemic fundraising had shriveled further, it had failed to field candidates for many local offices, and its headquarters office was shuttered. The Republican Party in the fifth largest county in Ohio was homeless, its possessions stuck in storage.\r\n

\u201cStay out of Montgomery\u00a0County.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nIn the early summer of 2014, the U.S.-Mexican border saw a surge of crossings by Central American women, their children and unaccompanied minors. The surge was the final blow to the House of Representatives\u2019 fading prospects to act on immigration reform. It also raised the immediate question of where to house the women and children while their fates were decided. In Dayton, Mayor Nan Whaley announced that her city would gladly do its part to take in some of them. \u201cOf course we would consider being helpful to the country, because we\u2019re an immigrant-friendly community,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nWhaley\u2019s announcement brought instant condemnation from Dayton\u2019s congressman, Mike Turner. Turner was the former mayor of Dayton and was elected to succeed Tony Hall after his 2002 retirement. Even after the 2011 redistricting, Turner\u2019s seat was one of the few remaining competitive districts in the state, and Turner was, by the standards of the House Republican caucus, a relative moderate. But he did not care much for Whaley, who was rumored to be eyeing his seat (she denied it.) And while his new district still included heavily Democratic Dayton, the city\u2019s population decline meant that the district by necessity now included more of the exurban periphery<\/a>, making it more conservative than it had been in Whalen\u2019s or Hall\u2019s time.\r\n\r\nWhen Turner weighed in on the migrant children fleeing El Salvador and Honduras, he sounded more like Rick Jones than like Whalen or Hall. He called Whaley\u2019s offer \u201ccompletely out of line,\u201d and said: \u201cWhen we talk about being an \u2018immigrant welcoming city,\u2019 we are not talking about welcoming people who are being victims of an illegal enterprise.\u201d In late July, he fired off a letter to Obama signed by Phil Plummer and five other local elected Republicans saying the Dayton area did not want any of the children there.\r\n\r\n
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A boarded-up home near Third Street in Dayton. In 1930, nearly three-quarters of Montgomery County\u2019s population lived in Dayton, but half a century later, after years of white flight, that share had plummeted to less than a third. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>A week later, the Obama administration announced it would not be scattering the women and children to cities like Dayton, and instead would hold them in facilities closer to the border. But the episode served to amplify the \u201csanctuary city\u201d talk swirling around Welcome Dayton. Dayton officials continued to resist the term, saying that while police did not stop, investigate or arrest people solely because of their suspected immigration status, they still investigated the immigration status of people involved in serious offenses and cooperated with federal requests to hold certain undocumented immigrants on retainers, within limits.\r\n\r\nNonetheless, the sanctuary-city term stuck. And the immigration debate became further inflamed when, shortly after the 2014 election, Obama announced his executive action protecting some 5 million immigrants from deportation in lieu of any congressional action on the issue. On June 16, 2015, Trump announced his campaign for president, saying he would build a wall on the southern border to keep Mexico from \u201csending rapists\u201d across it. Two weeks later, a young woman named Kathryn Steinle was killed in San Francisco by an undocumented Mexican who had been convicted of seven felonies and deported five times, and who said subsequently that he had come to San Francisco because of its lax enforcement of immigration laws.\r\n\r\nSteinle\u2019s death provoked an uproar. Trump said this \u201csenseless and totally preventable act of violence\u201d was \u201cyet another example of why we must secure our border.\u201d The House subcommittee on immigration held a hearing on Capitol Hill titled \u201cSanctuary Cities: A Threat to Public Safety.\u201d<\/a> There, the lone person called to testify in defense of cities with a lax approach to illegal immigration was Richard Biehl, Dayton\u2019s police chief. Just like that, Dayton\u2019s local debate over openness had intersected with the national one that was shaping a presidential race already showing signs of heading in unforeseen directions.\r\n\r\nBack in Montgomery County, Sheriff Plummer had all the more reason of his own to be skeptical of Welcome Dayton: His territory was suddenly a major hot spot in the nationwide heroin epidemic. Just as the Dayton area\u2019s location at the juncture of I-75 and I-70 had made it ideal for the logistics industry, so it had made it a nexus for Mexican traffickers<\/a>. In November, Plummer\u2019s deputies arrested a 40-year-old Mexican and found, in three homes he owned in the area, $450,000 in cash and 20 pounds of pure heroin, plus several guns. The drugs came from the Sinaloa cartel and amounted to one of the largest seizures ever in the Miami Valley. Medina had been deported from the U.S. three times. \u201cStay out of Montgomery County and stay out of the Miami Valley,\u201d Plummer said at the news conference announcing the arrest.\r\n\r\nThe traffickers were also using Dayton as an eager market for their product \u2014 a community rife with the economic despair and general demoralization that made places susceptible to the opiate scourge. In 2014, there were 127 fatal heroin overdoses in the county, more than double the rate from just three years earlier and among the highest per-capita rates in the country. The heroin surge was making Plummer even more wary of Dayton\u2019s happy talk about tolerance and integration. \u201cWe\u2019ve got three cartels here and they go where there\u2019s less pressure on them,\u201d he said.\r\n\r\nAs it happened, Plummer now had a new outlet for his misgivings. Just months earlier, the Montgomery County Republican Party \u2014 no longer homeless thanks to the offer of space at the Mandalay \u2014 had finally settled on a new chairman. He wasn\u2019t particularly political-minded, but he was well-regarded and well-liked and, most important, sufficiently service-minded to take on the thankless task of running a diminished county party: Phil Plummer.\r\n

\u201cThey\u2019re misleading\u00a0people.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nThe same week as the heroin seizure, Mayor Whaley reasserted her welcome to refugees. This time it wasn\u2019t Central American women and children fleeing violence and poverty, but Syrians fleeing a brutal civil war.\r\n\r\nIn September, she had joined with the mayors of 17 other cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, in signing a letter<\/a> saying they were willing to accept even more refugees from Syria than the Obama administration was proposing. On Friday, November 13, ISIS attackers in Paris killed 130 people. The following Monday, Congressman Turner used the attacks to take aim at Whaley\u2019s outreach to Syrian refugees. \u201cWhile Dayton is a welcoming city,\u201d he wrote to her in an open letter, \u201cin the wake of these deadly attacks and the tragic loss of lives, I urge you to prioritize the safety and security of our community and rescind your invitation to the Obama Administration to send Syrian refugees for relocation in Dayton, Ohio.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhaley refused to comply, saying the city would take in refugees if the Obama administration asked it to. \u201cShould the decision be made to place refugees from any country in the City of Dayton, we will continue to be a leader in the welcoming movement and will champion inclusive communities that enable all residents to thrive,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nIt was almost as if the two rivals were engaging in a pre-rehearsed duel. As with their standoff over the Central Americans, Whaley and Turner were speaking to completely different audiences; by standing up to the other, the confrontation served each of their interests. Nationwide polls had showed how much partisan sentiments on immigration had diverged<\/a>; just a decade earlier, Democrats and Republicans had answered similarly on the subject, but since then, they\u2019d polarized even more than on other issues. \u201cFor him, it\u2019s an albatross to be nailed to her,\u201d said Matt Joseph, a city commissioner who had helped create Welcome Dayton. \u201cFor her, it\u2019s something to get her votes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe rhetoric was being amplified in the Republican primary, with the candidates each seeking to outdo each other in their opposition to admitting Syrian refugees. By early December, following the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump was calling for a ban on any Muslims entering the U.S. Just like that, he had managed to fuse anxiety over immigration with anxiety over Islamic terrorism into a single potent mass.\r\n\r\nIt was all deeply unsettling to the Ahiska Turks. They were flourishing more with every year. Some were branching into the home health-care business. Some were saving up enough to buy homes in the suburbs. And one of them, Adil Baguirov, who had come to the country as a student years before his fellow Turks arrived as refugees, was getting into politics. He had been elected president of the Dayton Board of Education. He was handsome and well-spoken enough that it was easy to imagine him going far \u2014 though he joked that as a naturalized citizen, he couldn\u2019t become president.\r\n\r\n
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The Ahiska Turks worship at their community center near downtown Dayton. Islom Shakhbandarov, center, is appalled at the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the 2016 campaign. \u201cDonald Trump is the biggest enemy of this country,\u201d he says. \u201cHe don\u2019t understand what he\u2019s fighting with right now.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>The Turks were showing how well Muslim immigrants could fare in America, and how much they could do for a city that needed a boost. And it pained them to see other Muslims, from a country adjoining their ancestral homeland, being tarred as a national security threat. Baguirov had been fingerprinted twice over the course of his 15-month background check for permanent status, he said; the notion of terrorists pouring through the pipeline was absurd. \u201cThey\u2019re misleading people,\u201d he said. \u201cPoliticians who talk about immigration don\u2019t know anything about anything about immigration.\r\n\r\nIt was particularly bewildering for Baguirov, because he was a proud Republican. In fact, he was just the sort of new American who Republican Party leaders said the party could bring to its side, if only it tried: He believed in free markets and hard work and personal responsibility and had limited sympathy for those who came to the country illegally, unlike people like him, who had jumped through all the hoops to do it right. The irony was rich: One of the most promising moderate Republican politicians left in Dayton, Ohio in the age of Trump was a Muslim.\r\n

\u201cYour freedom and liberty are at\u00a0risk.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nFor Don Phillips, at the Mandalay, Trump\u2019s fusing of immigration and national security had essentially sealed the deal. In recent years, the former George H.W. Bush admirer had grown more and more animated by the usual litany of talk radio issues: his letter to Boehner had cited Obamacare, Benghazi, and the scandal over the IRS targeting Tea Party groups for closer scrutiny. It had even lamented that \u201cpretty soon state\u2019s rights will be a thing of the past\u201d \u2014 a striking line coming from a Republican in the area that had produced pro-civil rights Republicans like McCulloch and Whalen.\r\n\r\nThere were still glimmers of Phillips\u2019 past moderation. For one thing, he thought deporting illegal immigrants was unworkable. But he was with Trump when it came to the Muslim threat. \u201cBush should have shut down the border after 9\/11 and reassessed what we were doing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe would not be in this position today with [ISIS] and some of the foreigners coming into this country that don\u2019t like us.\u201d\r\n\r\nGreg Gantt, the former party chairman, was supporting his state\u2019s governor, John Kasich, as was Mike Turner, the congressman, while Phil Plummer was for Marco Rubio. But everywhere one looked, it seemed, there were signs that the local Republican establishment, such as it still was, was in disarray. Phillips was not the only fixture of the county GOP with Trump \u2014 so was Patrick Flanagan, a former county party chairman who was the longest-serving member of the state Republican committee. Rob Scott, the young lawyer who had briefly run the county party, was not only with Trump but had been put in charge of running his Ohio campaign for the primary.\r\n\r\n
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Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones views Dayton, just to the north, as a bastion of illegal immigrants and lax liberalism. \u201cI tell anybody that\u2019s wanting to commit a crime here, if you\u2019re from another country, I tell them to go Dayton. They\u2019re fine. They give you free stuff. They want you to be there. They got welfare.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>The crackup was visible in the exurbs, too. One winter weeknight, the Warren County Republican Party met to decide on which candidates for local office to endorse in the March 15 primary. Turnout was high, well over 100 people, befitting a county party that had, over the years, been the scene of high-pitched ideological battles<\/a> between anti-abortion activists, Tea Partiers and a smattering of moderates. The meeting ran well over two hours as one candidate after another rose to vouch for his or her conservative credentials. One judicial candidate touted the fact that he had a concealed carry permit for his gun; a few minutes later another one-upped him by saying he had 50 guns in his house. A candidate for the seemingly apolitical position of county reporter declared: \u201cYour freedom and liberty are at risk because of the government taking from you and giving to others.\u201d Late in the meeting, a resolution to object to the state party committee\u2019s recent endorsement of Kasich passed overwhelmingly. It had no practical effect, but sent the message that in the heart of Republican Ohio, the party line no longer mattered.\r\n\r\nThe next day, Sheriff Jones received in his large office adjacent to the Butler County jail the campaign manager for one of the Republicans running to replace John Boehner. The candidate, state Sen. Bill Beagle, was in the business-friendly mode of Republican that Boehner represented, but while Boehner had tried to pass immigration reform in the House, Beagle was seeking Jones\u2019 endorsement. He got it, and within weeks Beagle had put out an ad with Jones<\/a> that warned: \u201cAmericans borders are being overrun by criminals and who knows how many terrorists.\u201d\r\n\r\nJones\u2019 presidential endorsement had already been made. He was with Trump.\r\n

\u201cThey want\u00a0security.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nTrump came to Dayton \u2014 or rather, the airport just north of town in Vandalia, where one of the shuttered Delphi plants was \u2014 on March 12, the Saturday before the primary. It was the day after his rally in Chicago had been canceled amid massive protests, and the friction from that standoff seemed to carry east to the flat empty terrain around the airport, where the access roads were jammed hours before his arrival. The protesters were out early, too. \u201cNo Hate in My State,\u201d read one sign. \u201cTrump Make Dayton Great Again: Please Leave.\u201d \u201cWill Trade Trump for 100 Refugees.\u201d\r\n\r\nInside the airplane hangar, the mood was festive. The candidate\u2019s eclectic soundtrack played on endless loop (Stones, Billy Joel, Pavarotti). There were husbands in golf caps with well-manicured wives. There were frat boys. But most noticeable were the many fathers with their grown or near-grown sons.\r\n\r\nOne moment the plane wasn\u2019t there, and then it was. The crowd surged forward, as it does on the first drumbeat in a rock show. Trump made his way to the podium set up at the edge of the hangar. \u201cOhio,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cI love Ohio.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe opened by talking about the protest in Chicago, \u201ca planned attack that came out of nowhere.\u201d It was sad that he had to cancel, but he didn\u2019t want any of his supporters to get hurt. \u201cWe have people that are so amazing. It\u2019s not necessarily loyalty to me, it\u2019s loyalty to the country,\u201d he said. \u201cThey want security, they want a great military, they want to take care of defense. They want a border. They want a wall<\/em>.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe paused, because he knew the chant would follow, and it did.\r\n\r\nBuild a wall. Build a wall. Build a wall.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019re going to build the wall, folks, don\u2019t worry. Who\u2019s going to pay for the wall?\u201d\r\n\r\nMexico. Mexico. Mexico.<\/em>\r\n\r\nIt wasn\u2019t even five minutes into his speech and he had them. \u201cOur jobs are being sucked away,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s unbelievable what\u2019s happening. Our military can\u2019t beat ISIS. Our veterans are treated horribly. Our border is like Swiss cheese. People are just pouring over. On top of that, we\u2019ve divided the country \u2014 black and white, income groups, everybody hates each other. Even in Washington, Congress, the politicians hate each other \u2014 the Democrats hate the Republicans, the liberals hate the conservatives.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen a protester managed to penetrate the security perimeter around the podium and started to clamber up before being yanked down, and four agents leaped onto the stage to surround the candidate, the crowd roared in solidarity with the intended target, who looked slightly shaken.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was ready for him, but it\u2019s much easier if the cops do it,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd to think I had such an easy life. What do I need this for, right? I know why I need it. Because I\u2019ve done great, I love this country, and we\u2019re going to make this country great again. I owe it. It\u2019s payback time. It\u2019s payback time.\u201d\r\n\r\n
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Don Phillips was for Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries and housed the local Republican Party at his banquet hall, the Mandalay, just south of Dayton. But this year, he was for Trump. \u201cWashington is broken,\u201d he said. \u201cI definitely feel Trump is the answer to America.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>Don Phillips was not at the rally \u2014 he would have liked to go, but was busy at the Mandalay. The people who were at the rally were, by and large, not party people at all. Afterward, out on the muddy field that had taken overflow parking, I met two young men who had voted for Obama in 2008. Now, they were both drawn to Trump.\r\n\r\nAlex Jones, 30, shrugged in explanation. \u201cI was naive, man,\u201d he said. \u201cI was doing drugs all the time. As I get older, my view\u2019s not so clouded. I\u2019ve become more conservative.\u201d He worked part time at a pizza shop in Oxford, just west of Dayton, and part time delivering medicine to nursing homes. His father worked at a U-Haul after working at a hydraulics plant and his mother was the activity director at a nursing home. His Trump T-shirt featured an image of the mogul transposed on Shepard Fairey\u2019s famous 2008 image of Obama.\r\n\r\nThe other, Heath Bowling, a burly, jovial 36-year-old with a prodigious soul patch and a full set of Cincinnati Reds garb, had thought out his evolution more. A father of two, he now ran a small business in Montgomery County, installing siding, and he resented younger people, the underemployed ones around town, some of whom had gotten caught up in Bernie Sanders. \u201cThese kids, they expect everything to be free,\u201d he said. He was upset about food stamp fraud, people selling them for 50 cents on the dollar.\r\n\r\nBut he had not swung all the way across the spectrum. He had only scorn for congressional Republicans and Tea Party Republicans \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m so sick of hearing Obama was not born in the U.S. I mean, it\u2019s been eight years now!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd he was torn on immigration. He didn\u2019t care for Trump\u2019s outright nativism. But it was also wrong to suggest that someone could just come here to work because there was work to be had. After all, he said, \u201cWe can\u2019t jump on a plane and go to Croatia and get a job.\u201d Shutting the door would cut down on the heroin, he said. Six school classmates had died from overdoses. He\u2019d heard the stories about the bodies found in the bathrooms at the Cincinnati Bengals stadium, and the one in the porta-john that wasn\u2019t found for five days.\r\n\r\nHe knew he was relatively fortunate, with the siding firm. His dad was doing OK too \u2014 he had retired from the military and was now a foreman at the new Chinese-owned auto-glass plant at the former GM plant south of the city, one of the few bright spots<\/a> in the area, and one whose foreign ownership seemed to implicitly challenge Trump\u2019s protectionist message.\r\n\r\nBack in 2008, Bowling had been working as a lawn-care guy, spraying the lawn at the DHL shipping hub in nearby Wilmington when word came down that DHL was leaving, taking 3,500 jobs from the area. \u201cA guy came out and said, \u2018Dude, today is not the day. Roll that hose up and turn the water off.\u2019 I said, OK.\u201d\r\n

\u201cHe puts it\u00a0clearly.\u201d<\/h2>\r\nOver my days in the Dayton area, I spoke to other people like Heath Bowling \u2014 people who were supporting Trump who were not ideologically conservative, or even particularly \u201cangry,\u201d but were simply politically adrift.\r\n\r\nContessa Hammel, 43, worked at a Speedway gas station after four years in the military and had never voted in 25 years of eligibility because \u201cI didn\u2019t want to make an unintelligent decision.\u201d Now she spends her weekends doling out Trump signs. I found her hard at work in West Carrollton, just outside the city. \u201cHe makes it simple for people like me,\u201d she said. \u201cHe puts it clearly.\u201d\r\n\r\nJerome Brewer, 40, an auto-body repairman in Miamisburg who\u2019d swung between the parties, voted for John Kerry in 2004 and for Hillary Clinton against Obama in 2008 but for John McCain and Mitt Romney against Obama. The auto-body business had slowed after the GM closings \u2014 \u201cIf you get a little dent now you can live with it so you\u2019ll be able to put food on the table.\u201d He\u2019d seen Mexicans get jobs at his shop, making half his pay. \u201cTrump is talking about all the issues people I know are concerned about that no one would be talking about if it weren\u2019t for him,\u201d he said. \u201cFor the first time since Reagan there\u2019s a candidate I\u2019m really liking, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils.\u201d\r\n\r\n
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Heath Bowling, 36, who runs a siding and insulation business, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but now supports Donald Trump. He now scorns the sort of younger voters who, this time around, supported Bernie Sanders. \u201cThese kids, they expect everything to be free.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>I spoke with Brewer at the First Baptist Church in Miamisburg, where he had just cast his primary ballot for Trump. Trump got 36 percent in Ohio that day, roughly what he\u2019d gotten in many other states he\u2019d won, except that in Ohio the opposition had consolidated behind John Kasich (who had also been helped by Democrats and independents casting an anti-Trump vote on his behalf). Trump had lost badly to Kasich in the well-off suburbs of Columbus, the capital. He\u2019d lost to him in the better-off suburbs of Dayton, places like Oakwood and Beavercreek.\r\n\r\nBut overall in Montgomery County<\/a>, Trump had gotten more votes, in finishing second, than Hillary Clinton had received in winning the county in the Democratic primary. And he had cleaned up in the working-class suburbs like Miamisburg. In one precinct that voted at First Baptist, the Trump share was 57 percent; in another it was 60, among his highest in the entire state.\r\n\r\nThe stories of the Trump voters I spoke with started to blur together. Their fathers had had solid jobs in Dayton and had voted mostly Democrat (and, they would add in a candid aside, were not so enlightened about race.) They themselves had less solid jobs, and voted mostly Republican, when they voted, but with little sense of attachment.\r\n\r\nTony Hall, the former Democratic congressman, understood why Trump would appeal to these voters. Nobody had paid attention to them for a long time.\r\n\r\n\u201cTrump isn\u2019t saying anything other than you\u2019ve got trouble and I\u2019m going to take care of it, you got shafted and I\u2019m going to take care of it,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe Democrats are not addressing their issues and haven\u2019t been for years \u2026 Their constituency is the working people and the poor and they forgot about them for years \u2026 They want someone to sit down and have a beer with them and listen to them and address some of their issues and do everything they can to bring jobs back.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey had a home in neither party as it now existed in greater Dayton. They were certainly not part of the Democratic Party of Welcome Dayton \u2014 the world that, the day before the Trump rally, had hosted a visit to town by Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, stumping for Clinton. But they also weren\u2019t part of the Republican Party that had left Montgomery County and moved to the exurbs, whether it took the form of Warren County\u2019s ideological infighting or Boehner\u2019s country-club complacency. They were stranded between these two poles, in the older, frayed inner suburbs of Montgomery County.\r\n\r\nDon Phillips saw these people a lot as the campaign headed into summer, and as Dayton prepared for its moment in the sun, hosting the first presidential debate last September. They came to party headquarters at the Mandalay to pick up Trump signs. But, he said, marveling: \u201cThese are not Republicans.\u201d Or not Republicans as he\u2019d known them. They were no one\u2019s constituency, until now.","rendered":"
\n

By\u00a0Alec MacGillis<\/p>\n

Published July 15, 2016 by ProPublica<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

L<\/span>AST SEPT. 2,<\/span> Don Phillips sat down at his desk at the Mandalay banquet hall along the interstate just south of Dayton, Ohio, and composed an angry letter to the congressman from the adjoining district, the highest-ranking elected Republican in the country, then-House Speaker John Boehner.<\/p>\n

Dear John:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What has Congress done to solve any of these problems that affect all Americans? \u2026 What\u2019s going on with the Republicans? No wonder people are so interested in\u00a0TRUMP<\/strong>. Everyone is sick of electing politicians that do nothing and continue to go on vacations and work three days a week when the Country is in trouble. Congress needs to get in gear and do something to solve some of these problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The letter was, quite literally, a \u201cDear John\u201d break-up declaration. Phillips was once the picture of a Midwestern establishment Republican. He is a successful businessman who started out delivering food to the cafeterias and vending machines at the factories and tool-and-die shops that used to be all over Dayton. Thirty-two years ago, he built the Mandalay, the giant windowless catering hall on I-75, between the industrial park and the for-profit college. He has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. His upstairs office, where elevator music is piped in on the Mandalay\u2019s audio system, has pictures of himself with George H.W. Bush on the walls, a Bush commemorative golf putter leaning against the shelves, and a copy of Karl Rove\u2019s latest book on his desk. There is a framed certificate from 1981 declaring Phillips a member of the \u201cSenate Business Advisory Board\u201d in \u201crecognition of his commitment to preserve and strengthen the American free enterprise system.\u201d For the past few years, Phillips even let the Montgomery County Republican Party use a room at the Mandalay for its headquarters.<\/p>\n

He had known Boehner for three decades \u2014 had considered him a friend, had attended his golf tournaments. Yet the time for the break had come.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason you cannot do what needs to be done to lead your party, the American people need to step up to the plate and get people in Washington that can do the job, whether we are talking about the President, Congress or your job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can you name any major accomplishment that has been achieved for the American people since you have been Speaker? Everyone we know is disappointed in what is going on with the Congress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Three weeks after Phillips sent the letter, Boehner announced his resignation. While Phillips was under no illusions that his letter had played a part in Boehner\u2019s decision, he saw his own discontent with the party leadership as part of a swelling dissent that had, by that point, upended the Republican presidential campaign. In 2012, Phillips had supported Mitt Romney in the primaries. Yet this year, the man who housed the Republican establishment in his own building was supporting the man running against it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel very good about Trump. I\u2019m for Trump 100 percent. I\u2019m a Trump man and a lot of my family are Trump,\u201d he said. His wife, Cay, who often handles the Mandalay\u2019s front desk, had been wary of Donald Trump because of \u201csome of the things he was saying,\u201d but then she read Trump\u2019s latest book and changed her mind. \u201cHe really knows what he\u2019s doing,\u201d Don Phillips said. \u201cHe\u2019ll put people around him. He has no obligations to Washington. Washington is broken. I definitely feel Trump is the answer to America.\u201d<\/p>\n

The disruption that the nomination of Trump represents for the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan has been cast as a freakish anomaly, the equivalent of the earthquakes that hit the other side of Ohio in recent years. But just as those earthquakes had a likely explanation \u2014 gas and oil fracking in the Utica Shale \u2014 so can the crackup of the Republican Party and rise of Trump be traced back to what the geologists call the local site conditions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret the country has sorted itself into ever-more polarized camps. What is underappreciated is how much that dynamic has played out even within regions, even within a single relatively small metropolitan area like Dayton. The city along the Great Miami River, an hour north of Cincinnati, was once a bastion of moderation and heterodoxy, the sort of place where the spectrum was jumbled with conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans and everything in between. But a combination of trends \u2014 among them suburban flight, deindustrialization, the flip of the Solid South to Republicans \u2014 changed everything.<\/p>\n

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Don Phillips was for Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries and housed the local Republican Party at his banquet hall, the Mandalay. But this year, he was for Trump. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By 2016, the Dayton area consisted of an urban core greatly diminished in stature yet also increasingly assertive in its liberalism, to the degree that it had even made itself into a national poster child for tolerance toward immigrants. Meanwhile, Dayton\u2019s outlying areas were both home to a much larger share of the region\u2019s people and commerce and to a conservatism that was far more strident and monolithic than anything the area had known in decades past. Caught in the middle, in a political no man\u2019s land, were people who were at home in neither realm, descendants of conservative Democrats who had drifted from that party as it grew more culturally liberal and coastally oriented, yet who had formed only a tenuous connection with Republicans, one based more on grievance than ideology.<\/p>\n

Both parties had been transformed, but such was the nature of the realignment that in 2016, it was the Republican Party that suffered a crackup. For decades, Dayton has been one of the most competitive cities in one of the most competitive states in the country. In 2012, when Barack Obama narrowly won Ohio, he took Montgomery County, in which Dayton sits, by only 3 percentage points, making it the most closely contested of Ohio\u2019s half-dozen biggest urban counties. This year, Dayton became a bellwether once again: When Ohio Republicans went to the polls<\/a> in March to pick their nominee, of the nine largest counties in the state, Montgomery County was where Donald Trump fared best.<\/p>\n

The stresses that created these Trump voters had been building for decades in places like Dayton. For the most part, the political establishment ignored, dismissed or overlooked these forces, until suddenly they blew apart nearly everyone\u2019s blueprint for the presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou brought everyone else along with\u00a0you.\u201d<\/h2>\n

In 1971, another letter to another Republican congressman from Ohio: Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to William McCulloch to wish him well on his retirement from the House of Representatives. This was not something that former first ladies did often \u2014 especially to members of the opposing party \u2014 but McCulloch was a special case. \u201cYou, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThere were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill, without appearing to do so, but you never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone else along with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span>
Rep. William McCulloch in his Washington office on Sept. 11, 1963. (Bob Schutz\/AP Photo)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was little exaggeration in this praise. McCulloch, a country lawyer from tiny Piqua<\/a>, just north of Dayton, was a conservative in the Old Guard mold that had defined Ohio Republicanism since Robert Taft: fiscally prudent, wary of foreign entanglement, even-keeled to the point of stodgy. He wore red suspenders, returned a portion of his congressional office allowance each year and forswore spending pork for his district. He supported gun ownership and school prayer and opposed many social welfare programs. But he was also the proud descendant of abolitionists and had goaded President John F. Kennedy into pushing forward on civil rights and had then played a leading role in seeing the legislation home after Kennedy\u2019s assassination. \u201cTo do less,\u201d he said, \u201cwould be to shirk our responsibility as national legislators and as human beings who honor the principles of liberty and justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this, McCulloch was no outlier among fellow Ohio Republicans. The state leaned Republican back then \u2014 in 1960, Richard Nixon had beaten Kennedy in the state by 5 points, almost exactly the margin of victory he got in bellwether Montgomery County. Eighteen of the state\u2019s 24 congressional seats were held by Republicans in 1963 and 1964. And of them, all but one voted for the Civil Rights Act<\/a>, putting Ohio Republicans in a class of their own in supporting the bill. (All told, 136 House Republicans voted yea, and 35 nay.) The state had, after all, long prided itself on its history as a beacon of liberty: cross the Ohio River from Kentucky and you were free. It had lost the third-most men on the Union side of the Civil War, and its political culture shared quite a bit with Yankee New England, from which many of its early inhabitants had moved, especially in the state\u2019s northern half.<\/p>\n

McCulloch\u2019s mantle as Republican civil rights champion was soon assumed by Dayton\u2019s own congressman, Charles Whalen. Urbane and cerebral \u2014 he attended Harvard Business School before becoming an executive at the Dayton Dress Company and teaching economics at the University of Dayton \u2014 Whalen was the author of Ohio\u2019s fair-housing law in the state Legislature. He carried that commitment to Washington after he was elected to Congress in 1966 and, years later, wrote a book on the passage of the Civil Rights Act. He defied easy categorization: He vocally opposed the Vietnam War, but was also critical of War on Poverty programs and, as a Roman Catholic, opposed Roe v. Wade<\/em>. \u201cI have always been amused,\u201d he once wrote<\/a>, \u201cwhen pundits refer to a Congressman as \u2018liberal\u2019 for voting against $150 billion of waste in Vietnam and another Congressman as \u2018conservative\u2019 when he voted for it.\u201d Ideological diversity, he said, is \u201cbeneficial in that it provides the Party not only with the vitality necessary to keep astride of current political tides, but also the restraint that is helpful in making far-reaching decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCulloch and Whalen\u2019s self-confident moral authority was undergirded by the solidity and prosperity of their home base. For decades, Dayton had been an exemplar of American capitalism and ingenuity \u2014 back when America not only invented things but still made the things it invented, Dayton did a lot of both. In 1890, it generated more patents per capita than any other city<\/a> \u2014 there were the Wright Brothers and their bicycle shop, of course, but also James Ritty, the saloonkeeper who invented the mechanical cash register to keep his employees from pilfering dough, and John Patterson, who transformed Ritty\u2019s invention into the National Cash Register company, and Charles Kettering, the engineer who turned Ritty\u2019s creation electric. The sound of Dayton in these years was, literally, ka-ching<\/em>. The Third National Bank was finished with imported marble and mahogany woodwork; patrons did their business at bronze check desks. Local hotels included the Biltmore and the Algonquin \u2014 the aspirations were transparent, and not unjustified.<\/p>\n

Kettering went on to found the auto parts giant Delco, where he developed the electrical starting motor and leaded gasoline, plus side ventures with DuPont and others to invent Freon and colored paint for cars. In the postwar years, Dayton had a higher concentration of auto workers than anywhere outside of Michigan<\/a>. The city swelled with new arrivals in search of work \u2014 not just African-Americans on the Great Migration, but Scots-Irish up from Kentucky and Tennessee. By 1960, Dayton was still one of the 50 largest cities in the country \u2014 bigger than Charlotte, Tucson and Austin.<\/p>\n

But as Whalen\u2019s tenure carried into the 1970s, changes were underway. As elsewhere, the arrival of Southern blacks had been answered with white flight. In 1930, nearly three-quarters of Montgomery County\u2019s population lived in Dayton, but half a century later, that share had plummeted to less than a third. They had moved to working-class inner suburbs like Miamisburg and Huber Heights, tight-knit communities with modest, well-kept frame houses and bungalows, and more upscale Oakwood or Beavercreek, which was just across the line into Greene County. The city that remained was the second-most racially segregated of Ohio\u2019s eight largest<\/a>. And the Appalachian migrants had added a more conservative element to the area\u2019s political landscape.<\/p>\n

Midway through President Nixon\u2019s first term, he had been hooked by the 1970 book The Real Majority<\/em><\/a>, which argued that the classic swing voter was the \u201c47-year-old machinist\u2019s wife from Dayton.\u201d This voter tilted Democratic on economic issues, but Nixon and his adviser Pat Buchanan concluded that she could be won over by Republicans who stoked fears about welfare, school desegregation and crime. The irony was that the district with exactly the demographic being targeted by Nixon was<\/em> being represented throughout the 1970s by a Republican \u2014 one with an entirely different sort of politics than what Nixon envisioned.<\/p>\n

But by 1978, Whalen was coming under increasing pressure from local Republicans fed up with his liberal bent. Facing a primary challenge, he announced his retirement. The Republican Party in southwest Ohio \u2014 as elsewhere \u2014 was becoming less northern, less urban, and less liberal. And the city he was born in and represented for a dozen years was headed for trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople was\u00a0friendly.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Don Phillips didn\u2019t know what to make of the people he called \u201cthe Russians.\u201d They were good for business, renting out the Mandalay for their big weddings. But they were different than his usual customers. The men and women sat separately inside the hall. And the men lived it up like nothing he\u2019d ever seen \u2014 dozens of bottles of vodka, hundreds of packs of cigarettes. The butts ended up in the flower pots outside. He\u2019d had to triple the $500 cleaning fee for them. No problem, they said. They just stacked more cash on the desk.<\/p>\n

Where were they getting all that money? They were making it big in long-haul trucking. Dayton was a transport town \u2014 \u201clogistics,\u201d as the industry liked to call it \u2014 since it sat at the juncture of two major routes, I-75 and I-70. Half the population of the U.S. was within an 11-hour drive, something local boosters had taken to citing as a point of pride as so many of the city\u2019s other assets had fallen away. The \u201cRussians\u201d had gotten into the freight business soon after coming to town \u2014 after all, you didn\u2019t need fluent English to drive a truck. And now they were doing so well with it that some were driving sports cars around town \u2014 Porsches, Maseratis, you name it. Phillips couldn\u2019t figure how there was so much money in trucking, but he kept that to himself. \u201cWe\u2019re being nice to them,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not running them off, we\u2019re letting them come. But when they come they\u2019re going to behave just like anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Russians were actually Turks \u2014 specifically, what are known as Ahiska Turks, descendants of people who had migrated north centuries ago. After the Soviet Union broke up, they faced frequent persecution as a Muslim minority in Russia, and in 2004, the U.S. granted them refugee status. Some 11,000 arrived in the U.S.<\/a> before the refugee status expired in 2007. And in the years that followed, a couple thousand of them gravitated to Dayton, because Dayton had become a good place for starting over with nothing.<\/p>\n

By the time they arrived, Dayton\u2019s manufacturing industries had long been hollowing out<\/a>. Nearly half of the 20,000 jobs that existed in 1990 at five GM plants were gone by 2008, for example. Auto-parts maker Delphi, into which Kettering\u2019s Delco had been absorbed, dropped from 10,000 employees in the Dayton area in 2002 to a mere 800 by 2009. The papermaking giant Mead gave up its home base in Dayton in a 2001 merger.<\/p>\n

But nothing hurt as much as the decline of NCR, as Patterson\u2019s company was now called, having long since expanded beyond cash registers to ATM machines, bar code scanners and software. Some 15,000 manufacturing jobs with NCR had vanished from the city even before the company announced in June 2009, barely past the lowest point of the recession, that it was moving its headquarters to Atlanta, complete with this graceless grace note from its CEO: \u201cWe had a very difficult time recruiting people to live and work in Dayton.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span>
Islom Shakhbandarov and other Ahiska Turks in Dayton have prospered in the long-haul freight business. They drive Porsches and Maseratis around town. And when they pay for their big weddings at the Mandalay, they pay with stacks of cash. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Total despair was precluded only by the comforting presence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the edge of town. The city\u2019s population was 141,000, down by nearly half over the previous five decades and now just 183rd largest in the country. The broad streets of downtown, spreading out on the flat ground along the river, suddenly seemed too wide, too empty. The elegant Algonquin Hotel was now the discount Grand, where rooms went for under $100. And the median sales price for a home in the city was around $80,000, half the national average.<\/p>\n

This made it appealingly affordable for the Ahiska Turks. At the same time, the city did not seem as far gone as other bargain-basement Rust Belt cities like Detroit or Youngstown. The Turks zeroed in on Old North Dayton<\/a>, which had once been heavily Eastern European. \u201cThe neighborhoods were decent, actually. Very decent. Not like really, really bad with huge crime rates,\u201d said Islom Shakhbandarov, the charismatic president of the local Ahiska Turkish American Community Center.<\/p>\n

But there was something else about Dayton. \u201cPeople was friendly \u2014 unusually friendly,\u201d said Shakhbandarov. \u201cWe started spreading the word that Dayton was welcoming.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe became aware of our\u00a0ignorance.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Chuck Whalen had been succeeded as Dayton\u2019s congressman by Tony Hall, a Democrat. Hall had grown up in a Republican family in town \u2014 his father ran a laundry \u2014 but he\u2019d joined the Peace Corps and had come back a Kennedy Democrat. While he had a different party affiliation than Whalen, he aspired to his example. \u201cThe Republican leadership was griping about how he was too liberal in some of his ways,\u201d Hall says, \u201cbut he was representing his district, and representing thoughtful ways to do things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon enough, Hall was having differences with his own party leadership. He could tell that many of his Democratic constituents \u2014 blue-collar workers, the proverbial machinists\u2019 wives \u2014 did not care much for the direction the national party was taking in the 1980s and \u201890s. In 1980, Montgomery County had been one of only two counties<\/a> in the entire central and western swath of Ohio that Jimmy Carter carried against Ronald Reagan. Eight years later, the county gave a substantially bigger margin<\/a> to George H.W. Bush than he received across the state. Hall\u2019s constituents were especially down on President Bill Clinton\u2019s promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement, he said. \u201cA lot of Democrats in the Midwest feel that they didn\u2019t leave the Democratic Party \u2014 they feel like the Democratic Party left them,\u201d he says. \u201cThey had basic desires and needs and wanted them to represent the working man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the Democrats who had moved out to the more working-class suburbs of Dayton started voting Republican. That party had, after all, been making the sort of crime-and-welfare pitch that Nixon had envisioned in 1970 to appeal to these voters\u2019 conservative views on race and social issues. The drift among these voters from the Democratic Party accelerated with the wave of auto plant closings that started after 2000, Hall said. \u201cAs long as we had our 10 or 12 auto plants, we were pretty good, but we felt that the NAFTA deal made it a lot easier for companies to go to Mexico \u2014 and they did. They shut down our factories,\u201d says Hall. Voters just coming of age \u201csaw their Moms and Dads lose their jobs and they didn\u2019t think anyone did anything for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In 1960, Dayton was one of the 50th biggest cities in the country. Since then, its population has fallen by nearly half and its rank has slipped to 183rd. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As those Democrats had, over time, left Dayton for the suburbs and then left the party as well, the party they had left behind in the city had taken on a different character. By the late-2000\u2019s, Dayton was dominated by a staunchly liberal leadership cohort: an assortment of African-Americans (by this point Dayton was 43 percent black), activist-minded elected officials and bureaucrats, college professors, and other urbanite professionals who were doing their part to bring the city back \u2014 going to the theater, patronizing the growing bar and restaurant scene on East Fifth Street. And in 2011, this cohort decided to take up a very particular liberal cause: making the city more welcoming to immigrants and refugees.<\/p>\n

It was, on its face, an unlikely issue to champion. The city had refugees other than the Turks (Africans, Iraqis) and had experienced an uptick in Mexican immigration starting in the late 1990s \u2014 people come to work in construction and fast food and the tomato farms north of the city \u2014 but its foreign-born population was only 4.5 percent of the total, barely above the statewide average. Still, word started to come of newcomers having difficulties \u2014 the Ahiska Turks were having run-ins with building inspectors as they renovated their homes; undocumented Hispanic immigrants weren\u2019t comfortable reporting robberies to the cops and were experiencing discrimination from landlords.<\/p>\n

To Dayton\u2019s liberals, reports of troubles being encountered by new arrivals were a rebuke. \u201cWe became aware of our ignorance,\u201d said Tom Wahlrab, then-director of Dayton\u2019s Human Relations Council, a mediator by training who lived in a renovated townhouse in the city\u2019s historic Oregon District. \u201cWe said, what could we do with the community for welcoming these newcomers?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dayton was becoming a small blue island \u2014 Obama won 76 percent of the city\u2019s vote in 2008, compared with only 44 percent in the rest of Montgomery County, a difference that had grown by 6 percentage points since 1980, when Jimmy Carter won 66 percent in the city and 40 percent in the rest of the county. The Republican sweep in the 2010 midterms, which had put the Ohio state government under total GOP control, had put a halt for the time being to any immediate prospects of reforming the nation\u2019s broken immigration laws or figuring out what to do with the 11 million undocumented people living in the shadows. Arizona and Alabama passed strict laws clamping down on illegal immigrants in 2010 and 2011.<\/p>\n

But Dayton went in the opposite direction. There was a task force, subcommittees, and a series of \u201cconversations\u201d where residents turned out to talk about what Dayton could do for its new arrivals. There was a report that became an action plan<\/a> that called for, among other things, expanded interpretation services in courts, health care and government; a World Cup-style soccer tournament between immigrant groups to be held every fall; and the provision of a municipal ID card for those ineligible for a driver\u2019s license. Already, it was the policy of the city police not to spend limited resources trying to ferret out undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

A public hearing on the plan<\/a> in September 2011 attracted only three in opposition, anti-illegal immigrant activists from the Cleveland area. Nan Whaley, an Indiana native who stayed in Dayton after attending college and was elected to the city commission in 2005, spoke up for the plan: \u201cWe\u2019re recognizing that we\u2019ve had incredible population loss over the past 40 years, and that we\u2019re trying to redefine what an open city looks like.\u201d Two weeks later she and her fellow city commissioners approved the plan, 4-0.<\/p>\n

Welcome Dayton, as it was called, hired a director and two \u201cimmigration resource specialists.\u201d It added free tax assistance websites in different languages to help immigrants get their earned-income credits. It guided immigrants through the home-buying process. It held \u201ccommunity-building\u201d events called \u201cVoices\u201d where immigrants talked about their background. The orchestra had a Welcome Dayton weekend. The World Cup soccer tournament was a hit. Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrations drew hundreds more than in years prior. Nan Whaley, one of the leading champions of the initiative, was elected mayor in 2013. Just a few weeks earlier, the program had gotten the ultimate liberal affirmation: a spot on \u201cThe Daily Show.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span>
Tom Wahlrab was the director of the city\u2019s Human Relations Council and a major force behind launching Welcome Dayton. \u201cWe became aware of our ignorance,\u201d he said. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThey got\u00a0welfare.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Phil Plummer was caught in the middle. The son of a city firefighter, he had grown up in Old North Dayton when it was still thriving and had, after starting out as a corrections officer, worked all the way up the ladder to be elected Montgomery County sheriff as a Republican in 2008. On the one hand, he didn\u2019t care much for Welcome Dayton, which smacked too much of making Dayton a \u201csanctuary city,\u201d much as city leaders rejected the term. \u201cThe intent was to welcome immigration \u2026 but it went a little too far and brought the illegals here,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve got a policy where police can\u2019t ask anyone their immigration status, and to me that\u2019s an indicator of a sanctuary city. If I can\u2019t ask you your immigration status, it\u2019s tough to enforce the law of the land.\u201d He also fretted about how much undocumented immigrants were costing the city. \u201cAre they paying taxes?\u201d he said. \u201cIt is<\/em> a burden to us \u2014 they are going to our schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, he found it hard not to sympathize with the new arrivals. \u201cThey want an opportunity,\u201d he said, \u201csame as our ancestors did.\u201d He was in favor of reforming the nation\u2019s immigration laws. \u201cWe got to be honest with ourselves \u2014 they\u2019re not going to deport them,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething\u2019s got to be done \u2014 we got to quit kicking the can down the road.\u201d He even thought many of the immigrants would end up in his party: \u201cThey\u2019re Republicans. They have a good work ethic.\u201d Plummer\u2019s compassion got the better of him when he received calls from a local nun, Sister Maria Stacy, asking if she could visit undocumented immigrants being held at the jail. Sister Maria had been dispatched to Dayton in 2002 from her native Cincinnati to minister to the new immigrants there \u2014 organizing English classes, offering help in finding lawyers, and, yes, praying with them in jail when it came to that. \u201cShe\u2019s a little radical,\u201d Plummer said. \u201cBut we bend over backwards for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plummer\u2019s nuanced view was also in stark contrast with his counterpart just to the south, in Butler County. Butler was once mostly farmland surrounding a couple small market and manufacturing towns, Hamilton and Middletown, but over time had turned into an exurb to both Cincinnati and Dayton, tripling in population since 1940. Warren County, just to Butler\u2019s east, had once been even less developed and had grown almost tenfold over the same period as tract housing developments flared out across the former soybean fields. Their combined population had vaulted to 600,000 over the course of a half century when Montgomery\u2019s population had stayed flat at about 530,000.<\/p>\n

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Sister Maria Stacy, here attending a quinceanera ceremony in Dayton, often seeks permission from the local sheriff to visit undocumented immigrants being held at the county jail. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As they had grown, these exurbs had become the Republican bedrock in Ohio. When President Bush\u2019s 2004 reelection came down to Ohio, Butler went for him with 66 percent of its vote and Warren with 72 percent. In fact, those two counties plus two other Dayton exurbs, Greene and Miami counties, togetherprovided Bush\u2019s narrow 120,000-vote margin<\/a> of victory in the state.<\/p>\n

These fast-growing counties had not only drawn the region\u2019s Republicans to them. By concentrating Republicans far from Democratic-dominated cities like Dayton, they seemed to change the very character of Ohio Republicanism from the strand embodied by congressmen like Bill McCulloch and Chuck Whalen. Maybe it had to with the political science<\/a> showing that the less densely settled a place was, the more likely it was to be politically conservative. Maybe it was the other effect<\/a> the political scientists talked about, how being surrounded<\/a> by people with similar politics tended to make one\u2019s politics more extreme.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the causes of the transformation, the fact was that part of McCulloch\u2019s former district, stretching north of Dayton, was now represented by Jim Jordan, an arch-conservative who would eventually become chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. The bulk of McCulloch\u2019s former district had been represented since the early 1990s by John Boehner. He was, by the standards of the day, considered relatively moderate. But by the time he became speaker of the House in 2011, his district had been shifting right for quite some time as well.<\/p>\n

No one embodied this shift better than Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones, who was first elected in 2004. Jones looked like he\u2019d stepped out of a Western, with a hulking frame and exemplary walrus mustache, and, in a sense, fashioned himself as a frontier lawman. He made two trips to inspect the Mexican border. And he prides himself on his tough enforcement of immigration laws in his own territory. Jones\u2019 publicity stunts have included posting an \u201cIllegal Aliens Here\u201d sign<\/a> with an arrow pointing to his jail and sending the Mexican government a $900,000 bill for the cost of jailing illegal immigrants. These stunts earned him a spot of his own on \u201cThe Daily Show.\u201d<\/a> They also did nothing to hinder his easy reelection in 2008 and 2012.<\/p>\n

To hear Jones tell it, Dayton was the end of the earth, the darkness to be guarded against. \u201cI tell anybody that\u2019s wanting to commit a crime here, if you\u2019re from another country, I tell them to go Dayton,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re fine. They give you free stuff. They want you to be there. They got welfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in Dayton, Plummer viewed Jones\u2019 outspokenness with bemusement tinged with envy. \u201cHe\u2019s a crazy guy,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course, that\u2019s a big Republican area, so he can go out on a limb. This is a Democrat town, so I gotta\u2026 \u201d He trailed off, leaving the local political imperatives implied.<\/p>\n

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Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones marches at the head of the Fourth of July parade in Middletown, Ohio. Jones has made a name for himself in opposing illegal immigration \u2014 once, he sent the Mexican government a $900,000 bill for immigrants he was housing at the county jail. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cGo ahead, knock yourself\u00a0out.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Butler County, Warren County, and the other growing exurbs were helping put the Republican Party in Montgomery County in dire straits. As suburbia had sprawled to the farther-out counties, taking the most engaged and wealthy conservatives with it, the party that was left in Dayton and its inner suburbs was bereft of resources and direction.<\/p>\n

There were still plenty of people who voted Republican in the county \u2014 George W. Bush had barely lost it in 2004. Some of them were in the county\u2019s middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs, like Kettering and Oakwood. But many of the Bush voters were the blue-collar ex-Democrats of working-class suburbs like Miamisburg and Huber Heights. Vote as they might, their allegiance to the Republican Party \u2014 whether what remained of its moderate establishment in Dayton or the newer, more ideological vanguard in the exurbs \u2014 was limited.<\/p>\n

This had left the Montgomery County Republican Party increasingly adrift. It had been led since 2006 by Greg Gantt, an amiable, mild-mannered Dayton lawyer. But fundraising was a constant struggle and around 2009, he started having to contend with a new coterie of Tea Party activists, mobilized by the conservative backlash against Obama. The ferment they brought into the party throughout the state helped fuel the party\u2019s big 2010 sweep of state offices, which in turn allowed it to control the decennial redistricting process. A year later, in 2012, Republicans would win 52 percent of the House vote in Ohio but 75 percent of the state\u2019s congressional seats<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As time went on, though, these new activists also sought to block and second-guess Gantt at every turn. He found their claims to revolutionary status tiresome \u2014 it was as if they thought they were the first ones ever to propose different ways of doing party business. \u201cIt\u2019s fingernails on a chalkboard when I hear people talk about \u2018the establishment,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cWhat the hell is that \u2014 is there a secret meeting of all the people in the party?\u201d<\/p>\n

Also complicating Gantt\u2019s task was the fact that, at the national level, the party had been for a while now been growing far more Southern-dominated as the realignment of Southern conservative Democrats into Republicans completed itself. It was George Voinovich, the former Ohio governor, who, just prior to his 2011 retirement from the Senate, had deplored the regional shift within his party. \u201cWe got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns,\u201d he said, referring to his arch-conservative colleagues from South Carolina and Oklahoma. \u201cIt\u2019s the Southerners \u2026 They get on TV and go \u2018errrr, errrrr.\u2019 People hear them and say, \u2018These people, they\u2019re Southerners. The party\u2019s being taken over by Southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?\u2019\u201d Voinovich reiterated this when I spoke with him in early April 2016, prior to his death in June. \u201cJim DeMint used to say, \u2018If you don\u2019t subscribe to his version of the Republican Party, you\u2019re not a really a Republican,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI used to tell him that a lot of things you subscribe to are like manure on the rug in Ohio.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2012, Gantt finally grew so tired of the challenge of maintaining his corner of the Ohio Republican Party that he ceded control to one of the new activists, a 30-year-old lawyer named Rob Scott. Scott was a Kettering native who had founded the Dayton Tea Party and served on the ballot committee for a statewide initiative to end Ohio\u2019s estate tax. \u201cThey thought everything we were doing was wrong and they knew everything,\u201d Gantt said. \u201cI was trying to make up my mind. I thought, if you are in charge of a divided house, how much fun is that going to be? I said, \u2018Rob, if you want it, you got it.\u2019 I sat down with them and said, \u2018It\u2019ll take me a year to go around and introduce you to the money people, to teach you everything I know.\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m done, but I\u2019ll hang around and show you the ropes,\u2019and they said, \u2018No we got it.\u2019 I said, \u2018Go ahead, knock yourself out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a year and a half, Scott himself was gone, forced out<\/a> for poor performance in September 2013. The party\u2019s anemic fundraising had shriveled further, it had failed to field candidates for many local offices, and its headquarters office was shuttered. The Republican Party in the fifth largest county in Ohio was homeless, its possessions stuck in storage.<\/p>\n

\u201cStay out of Montgomery\u00a0County.\u201d<\/h2>\n

In the early summer of 2014, the U.S.-Mexican border saw a surge of crossings by Central American women, their children and unaccompanied minors. The surge was the final blow to the House of Representatives\u2019 fading prospects to act on immigration reform. It also raised the immediate question of where to house the women and children while their fates were decided. In Dayton, Mayor Nan Whaley announced that her city would gladly do its part to take in some of them. \u201cOf course we would consider being helpful to the country, because we\u2019re an immigrant-friendly community,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Whaley\u2019s announcement brought instant condemnation from Dayton\u2019s congressman, Mike Turner. Turner was the former mayor of Dayton and was elected to succeed Tony Hall after his 2002 retirement. Even after the 2011 redistricting, Turner\u2019s seat was one of the few remaining competitive districts in the state, and Turner was, by the standards of the House Republican caucus, a relative moderate. But he did not care much for Whaley, who was rumored to be eyeing his seat (she denied it.) And while his new district still included heavily Democratic Dayton, the city\u2019s population decline meant that the district by necessity now included more of the exurban periphery<\/a>, making it more conservative than it had been in Whalen\u2019s or Hall\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

When Turner weighed in on the migrant children fleeing El Salvador and Honduras, he sounded more like Rick Jones than like Whalen or Hall. He called Whaley\u2019s offer \u201ccompletely out of line,\u201d and said: \u201cWhen we talk about being an \u2018immigrant welcoming city,\u2019 we are not talking about welcoming people who are being victims of an illegal enterprise.\u201d In late July, he fired off a letter to Obama signed by Phil Plummer and five other local elected Republicans saying the Dayton area did not want any of the children there.<\/p>\n

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A boarded-up home near Third Street in Dayton. In 1930, nearly three-quarters of Montgomery County\u2019s population lived in Dayton, but half a century later, after years of white flight, that share had plummeted to less than a third. (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A week later, the Obama administration announced it would not be scattering the women and children to cities like Dayton, and instead would hold them in facilities closer to the border. But the episode served to amplify the \u201csanctuary city\u201d talk swirling around Welcome Dayton. Dayton officials continued to resist the term, saying that while police did not stop, investigate or arrest people solely because of their suspected immigration status, they still investigated the immigration status of people involved in serious offenses and cooperated with federal requests to hold certain undocumented immigrants on retainers, within limits.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the sanctuary-city term stuck. And the immigration debate became further inflamed when, shortly after the 2014 election, Obama announced his executive action protecting some 5 million immigrants from deportation in lieu of any congressional action on the issue. On June 16, 2015, Trump announced his campaign for president, saying he would build a wall on the southern border to keep Mexico from \u201csending rapists\u201d across it. Two weeks later, a young woman named Kathryn Steinle was killed in San Francisco by an undocumented Mexican who had been convicted of seven felonies and deported five times, and who said subsequently that he had come to San Francisco because of its lax enforcement of immigration laws.<\/p>\n

Steinle\u2019s death provoked an uproar. Trump said this \u201csenseless and totally preventable act of violence\u201d was \u201cyet another example of why we must secure our border.\u201d The House subcommittee on immigration held a hearing on Capitol Hill titled \u201cSanctuary Cities: A Threat to Public Safety.\u201d<\/a> There, the lone person called to testify in defense of cities with a lax approach to illegal immigration was Richard Biehl, Dayton\u2019s police chief. Just like that, Dayton\u2019s local debate over openness had intersected with the national one that was shaping a presidential race already showing signs of heading in unforeseen directions.<\/p>\n

Back in Montgomery County, Sheriff Plummer had all the more reason of his own to be skeptical of Welcome Dayton: His territory was suddenly a major hot spot in the nationwide heroin epidemic. Just as the Dayton area\u2019s location at the juncture of I-75 and I-70 had made it ideal for the logistics industry, so it had made it a nexus for Mexican traffickers<\/a>. In November, Plummer\u2019s deputies arrested a 40-year-old Mexican and found, in three homes he owned in the area, $450,000 in cash and 20 pounds of pure heroin, plus several guns. The drugs came from the Sinaloa cartel and amounted to one of the largest seizures ever in the Miami Valley. Medina had been deported from the U.S. three times. \u201cStay out of Montgomery County and stay out of the Miami Valley,\u201d Plummer said at the news conference announcing the arrest.<\/p>\n

The traffickers were also using Dayton as an eager market for their product \u2014 a community rife with the economic despair and general demoralization that made places susceptible to the opiate scourge. In 2014, there were 127 fatal heroin overdoses in the county, more than double the rate from just three years earlier and among the highest per-capita rates in the country. The heroin surge was making Plummer even more wary of Dayton\u2019s happy talk about tolerance and integration. \u201cWe\u2019ve got three cartels here and they go where there\u2019s less pressure on them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

As it happened, Plummer now had a new outlet for his misgivings. Just months earlier, the Montgomery County Republican Party \u2014 no longer homeless thanks to the offer of space at the Mandalay \u2014 had finally settled on a new chairman. He wasn\u2019t particularly political-minded, but he was well-regarded and well-liked and, most important, sufficiently service-minded to take on the thankless task of running a diminished county party: Phil Plummer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re misleading\u00a0people.\u201d<\/h2>\n

The same week as the heroin seizure, Mayor Whaley reasserted her welcome to refugees. This time it wasn\u2019t Central American women and children fleeing violence and poverty, but Syrians fleeing a brutal civil war.<\/p>\n

In September, she had joined with the mayors of 17 other cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, in signing a letter<\/a> saying they were willing to accept even more refugees from Syria than the Obama administration was proposing. On Friday, November 13, ISIS attackers in Paris killed 130 people. The following Monday, Congressman Turner used the attacks to take aim at Whaley\u2019s outreach to Syrian refugees. \u201cWhile Dayton is a welcoming city,\u201d he wrote to her in an open letter, \u201cin the wake of these deadly attacks and the tragic loss of lives, I urge you to prioritize the safety and security of our community and rescind your invitation to the Obama Administration to send Syrian refugees for relocation in Dayton, Ohio.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whaley refused to comply, saying the city would take in refugees if the Obama administration asked it to. \u201cShould the decision be made to place refugees from any country in the City of Dayton, we will continue to be a leader in the welcoming movement and will champion inclusive communities that enable all residents to thrive,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It was almost as if the two rivals were engaging in a pre-rehearsed duel. As with their standoff over the Central Americans, Whaley and Turner were speaking to completely different audiences; by standing up to the other, the confrontation served each of their interests. Nationwide polls had showed how much partisan sentiments on immigration had diverged<\/a>; just a decade earlier, Democrats and Republicans had answered similarly on the subject, but since then, they\u2019d polarized even more than on other issues. \u201cFor him, it\u2019s an albatross to be nailed to her,\u201d said Matt Joseph, a city commissioner who had helped create Welcome Dayton. \u201cFor her, it\u2019s something to get her votes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rhetoric was being amplified in the Republican primary, with the candidates each seeking to outdo each other in their opposition to admitting Syrian refugees. By early December, following the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump was calling for a ban on any Muslims entering the U.S. Just like that, he had managed to fuse anxiety over immigration with anxiety over Islamic terrorism into a single potent mass.<\/p>\n

It was all deeply unsettling to the Ahiska Turks. They were flourishing more with every year. Some were branching into the home health-care business. Some were saving up enough to buy homes in the suburbs. And one of them, Adil Baguirov, who had come to the country as a student years before his fellow Turks arrived as refugees, was getting into politics. He had been elected president of the Dayton Board of Education. He was handsome and well-spoken enough that it was easy to imagine him going far \u2014 though he joked that as a naturalized citizen, he couldn\u2019t become president.<\/p>\n

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The Ahiska Turks worship at their community center near downtown Dayton. Islom Shakhbandarov, center, is appalled at the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the 2016 campaign. \u201cDonald Trump is the biggest enemy of this country,\u201d he says. \u201cHe don\u2019t understand what he\u2019s fighting with right now.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Turks were showing how well Muslim immigrants could fare in America, and how much they could do for a city that needed a boost. And it pained them to see other Muslims, from a country adjoining their ancestral homeland, being tarred as a national security threat. Baguirov had been fingerprinted twice over the course of his 15-month background check for permanent status, he said; the notion of terrorists pouring through the pipeline was absurd. \u201cThey\u2019re misleading people,\u201d he said. \u201cPoliticians who talk about immigration don\u2019t know anything about anything about immigration.<\/p>\n

It was particularly bewildering for Baguirov, because he was a proud Republican. In fact, he was just the sort of new American who Republican Party leaders said the party could bring to its side, if only it tried: He believed in free markets and hard work and personal responsibility and had limited sympathy for those who came to the country illegally, unlike people like him, who had jumped through all the hoops to do it right. The irony was rich: One of the most promising moderate Republican politicians left in Dayton, Ohio in the age of Trump was a Muslim.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour freedom and liberty are at\u00a0risk.\u201d<\/h2>\n

For Don Phillips, at the Mandalay, Trump\u2019s fusing of immigration and national security had essentially sealed the deal. In recent years, the former George H.W. Bush admirer had grown more and more animated by the usual litany of talk radio issues: his letter to Boehner had cited Obamacare, Benghazi, and the scandal over the IRS targeting Tea Party groups for closer scrutiny. It had even lamented that \u201cpretty soon state\u2019s rights will be a thing of the past\u201d \u2014 a striking line coming from a Republican in the area that had produced pro-civil rights Republicans like McCulloch and Whalen.<\/p>\n

There were still glimmers of Phillips\u2019 past moderation. For one thing, he thought deporting illegal immigrants was unworkable. But he was with Trump when it came to the Muslim threat. \u201cBush should have shut down the border after 9\/11 and reassessed what we were doing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe would not be in this position today with [ISIS] and some of the foreigners coming into this country that don\u2019t like us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greg Gantt, the former party chairman, was supporting his state\u2019s governor, John Kasich, as was Mike Turner, the congressman, while Phil Plummer was for Marco Rubio. But everywhere one looked, it seemed, there were signs that the local Republican establishment, such as it still was, was in disarray. Phillips was not the only fixture of the county GOP with Trump \u2014 so was Patrick Flanagan, a former county party chairman who was the longest-serving member of the state Republican committee. Rob Scott, the young lawyer who had briefly run the county party, was not only with Trump but had been put in charge of running his Ohio campaign for the primary.<\/p>\n

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Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones views Dayton, just to the north, as a bastion of illegal immigrants and lax liberalism. \u201cI tell anybody that\u2019s wanting to commit a crime here, if you\u2019re from another country, I tell them to go Dayton. They\u2019re fine. They give you free stuff. They want you to be there. They got welfare.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The crackup was visible in the exurbs, too. One winter weeknight, the Warren County Republican Party met to decide on which candidates for local office to endorse in the March 15 primary. Turnout was high, well over 100 people, befitting a county party that had, over the years, been the scene of high-pitched ideological battles<\/a> between anti-abortion activists, Tea Partiers and a smattering of moderates. The meeting ran well over two hours as one candidate after another rose to vouch for his or her conservative credentials. One judicial candidate touted the fact that he had a concealed carry permit for his gun; a few minutes later another one-upped him by saying he had 50 guns in his house. A candidate for the seemingly apolitical position of county reporter declared: \u201cYour freedom and liberty are at risk because of the government taking from you and giving to others.\u201d Late in the meeting, a resolution to object to the state party committee\u2019s recent endorsement of Kasich passed overwhelmingly. It had no practical effect, but sent the message that in the heart of Republican Ohio, the party line no longer mattered.<\/p>\n

The next day, Sheriff Jones received in his large office adjacent to the Butler County jail the campaign manager for one of the Republicans running to replace John Boehner. The candidate, state Sen. Bill Beagle, was in the business-friendly mode of Republican that Boehner represented, but while Boehner had tried to pass immigration reform in the House, Beagle was seeking Jones\u2019 endorsement. He got it, and within weeks Beagle had put out an ad with Jones<\/a> that warned: \u201cAmericans borders are being overrun by criminals and who knows how many terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jones\u2019 presidential endorsement had already been made. He was with Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want\u00a0security.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Trump came to Dayton \u2014 or rather, the airport just north of town in Vandalia, where one of the shuttered Delphi plants was \u2014 on March 12, the Saturday before the primary. It was the day after his rally in Chicago had been canceled amid massive protests, and the friction from that standoff seemed to carry east to the flat empty terrain around the airport, where the access roads were jammed hours before his arrival. The protesters were out early, too. \u201cNo Hate in My State,\u201d read one sign. \u201cTrump Make Dayton Great Again: Please Leave.\u201d \u201cWill Trade Trump for 100 Refugees.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inside the airplane hangar, the mood was festive. The candidate\u2019s eclectic soundtrack played on endless loop (Stones, Billy Joel, Pavarotti). There were husbands in golf caps with well-manicured wives. There were frat boys. But most noticeable were the many fathers with their grown or near-grown sons.<\/p>\n

One moment the plane wasn\u2019t there, and then it was. The crowd surged forward, as it does on the first drumbeat in a rock show. Trump made his way to the podium set up at the edge of the hangar. \u201cOhio,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cI love Ohio.\u201d<\/p>\n

He opened by talking about the protest in Chicago, \u201ca planned attack that came out of nowhere.\u201d It was sad that he had to cancel, but he didn\u2019t want any of his supporters to get hurt. \u201cWe have people that are so amazing. It\u2019s not necessarily loyalty to me, it\u2019s loyalty to the country,\u201d he said. \u201cThey want security, they want a great military, they want to take care of defense. They want a border. They want a wall<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paused, because he knew the chant would follow, and it did.<\/p>\n

Build a wall. Build a wall. Build a wall.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to build the wall, folks, don\u2019t worry. Who\u2019s going to pay for the wall?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mexico. Mexico. Mexico.<\/em><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t even five minutes into his speech and he had them. \u201cOur jobs are being sucked away,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s unbelievable what\u2019s happening. Our military can\u2019t beat ISIS. Our veterans are treated horribly. Our border is like Swiss cheese. People are just pouring over. On top of that, we\u2019ve divided the country \u2014 black and white, income groups, everybody hates each other. Even in Washington, Congress, the politicians hate each other \u2014 the Democrats hate the Republicans, the liberals hate the conservatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a protester managed to penetrate the security perimeter around the podium and started to clamber up before being yanked down, and four agents leaped onto the stage to surround the candidate, the crowd roared in solidarity with the intended target, who looked slightly shaken.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was ready for him, but it\u2019s much easier if the cops do it,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd to think I had such an easy life. What do I need this for, right? I know why I need it. Because I\u2019ve done great, I love this country, and we\u2019re going to make this country great again. I owe it. It\u2019s payback time. It\u2019s payback time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span>
Don Phillips was for Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries and housed the local Republican Party at his banquet hall, the Mandalay, just south of Dayton. But this year, he was for Trump. \u201cWashington is broken,\u201d he said. \u201cI definitely feel Trump is the answer to America.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Don Phillips was not at the rally \u2014 he would have liked to go, but was busy at the Mandalay. The people who were at the rally were, by and large, not party people at all. Afterward, out on the muddy field that had taken overflow parking, I met two young men who had voted for Obama in 2008. Now, they were both drawn to Trump.<\/p>\n

Alex Jones, 30, shrugged in explanation. \u201cI was naive, man,\u201d he said. \u201cI was doing drugs all the time. As I get older, my view\u2019s not so clouded. I\u2019ve become more conservative.\u201d He worked part time at a pizza shop in Oxford, just west of Dayton, and part time delivering medicine to nursing homes. His father worked at a U-Haul after working at a hydraulics plant and his mother was the activity director at a nursing home. His Trump T-shirt featured an image of the mogul transposed on Shepard Fairey\u2019s famous 2008 image of Obama.<\/p>\n

The other, Heath Bowling, a burly, jovial 36-year-old with a prodigious soul patch and a full set of Cincinnati Reds garb, had thought out his evolution more. A father of two, he now ran a small business in Montgomery County, installing siding, and he resented younger people, the underemployed ones around town, some of whom had gotten caught up in Bernie Sanders. \u201cThese kids, they expect everything to be free,\u201d he said. He was upset about food stamp fraud, people selling them for 50 cents on the dollar.<\/p>\n

But he had not swung all the way across the spectrum. He had only scorn for congressional Republicans and Tea Party Republicans \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m so sick of hearing Obama was not born in the U.S. I mean, it\u2019s been eight years now!\u201d<\/p>\n

And he was torn on immigration. He didn\u2019t care for Trump\u2019s outright nativism. But it was also wrong to suggest that someone could just come here to work because there was work to be had. After all, he said, \u201cWe can\u2019t jump on a plane and go to Croatia and get a job.\u201d Shutting the door would cut down on the heroin, he said. Six school classmates had died from overdoses. He\u2019d heard the stories about the bodies found in the bathrooms at the Cincinnati Bengals stadium, and the one in the porta-john that wasn\u2019t found for five days.<\/p>\n

He knew he was relatively fortunate, with the siding firm. His dad was doing OK too \u2014 he had retired from the military and was now a foreman at the new Chinese-owned auto-glass plant at the former GM plant south of the city, one of the few bright spots<\/a> in the area, and one whose foreign ownership seemed to implicitly challenge Trump\u2019s protectionist message.<\/p>\n

Back in 2008, Bowling had been working as a lawn-care guy, spraying the lawn at the DHL shipping hub in nearby Wilmington when word came down that DHL was leaving, taking 3,500 jobs from the area. \u201cA guy came out and said, \u2018Dude, today is not the day. Roll that hose up and turn the water off.\u2019 I said, OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe puts it\u00a0clearly.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Over my days in the Dayton area, I spoke to other people like Heath Bowling \u2014 people who were supporting Trump who were not ideologically conservative, or even particularly \u201cangry,\u201d but were simply politically adrift.<\/p>\n

Contessa Hammel, 43, worked at a Speedway gas station after four years in the military and had never voted in 25 years of eligibility because \u201cI didn\u2019t want to make an unintelligent decision.\u201d Now she spends her weekends doling out Trump signs. I found her hard at work in West Carrollton, just outside the city. \u201cHe makes it simple for people like me,\u201d she said. \u201cHe puts it clearly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jerome Brewer, 40, an auto-body repairman in Miamisburg who\u2019d swung between the parties, voted for John Kerry in 2004 and for Hillary Clinton against Obama in 2008 but for John McCain and Mitt Romney against Obama. The auto-body business had slowed after the GM closings \u2014 \u201cIf you get a little dent now you can live with it so you\u2019ll be able to put food on the table.\u201d He\u2019d seen Mexicans get jobs at his shop, making half his pay. \u201cTrump is talking about all the issues people I know are concerned about that no one would be talking about if it weren\u2019t for him,\u201d he said. \u201cFor the first time since Reagan there\u2019s a candidate I\u2019m really liking, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span>
Heath Bowling, 36, who runs a siding and insulation business, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but now supports Donald Trump. He now scorns the sort of younger voters who, this time around, supported Bernie Sanders. \u201cThese kids, they expect everything to be free.\u201d (Ty Wright for ProPublica)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I spoke with Brewer at the First Baptist Church in Miamisburg, where he had just cast his primary ballot for Trump. Trump got 36 percent in Ohio that day, roughly what he\u2019d gotten in many other states he\u2019d won, except that in Ohio the opposition had consolidated behind John Kasich (who had also been helped by Democrats and independents casting an anti-Trump vote on his behalf). Trump had lost badly to Kasich in the well-off suburbs of Columbus, the capital. He\u2019d lost to him in the better-off suburbs of Dayton, places like Oakwood and Beavercreek.<\/p>\n

But overall in Montgomery County<\/a>, Trump had gotten more votes, in finishing second, than Hillary Clinton had received in winning the county in the Democratic primary. And he had cleaned up in the working-class suburbs like Miamisburg. In one precinct that voted at First Baptist, the Trump share was 57 percent; in another it was 60, among his highest in the entire state.<\/p>\n

The stories of the Trump voters I spoke with started to blur together. Their fathers had had solid jobs in Dayton and had voted mostly Democrat (and, they would add in a candid aside, were not so enlightened about race.) They themselves had less solid jobs, and voted mostly Republican, when they voted, but with little sense of attachment.<\/p>\n

Tony Hall, the former Democratic congressman, understood why Trump would appeal to these voters. Nobody had paid attention to them for a long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump isn\u2019t saying anything other than you\u2019ve got trouble and I\u2019m going to take care of it, you got shafted and I\u2019m going to take care of it,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe Democrats are not addressing their issues and haven\u2019t been for years \u2026 Their constituency is the working people and the poor and they forgot about them for years \u2026 They want someone to sit down and have a beer with them and listen to them and address some of their issues and do everything they can to bring jobs back.\u201d<\/p>\n

They had a home in neither party as it now existed in greater Dayton. They were certainly not part of the Democratic Party of Welcome Dayton \u2014 the world that, the day before the Trump rally, had hosted a visit to town by Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, stumping for Clinton. But they also weren\u2019t part of the Republican Party that had left Montgomery County and moved to the exurbs, whether it took the form of Warren County\u2019s ideological infighting or Boehner\u2019s country-club complacency. They were stranded between these two poles, in the older, frayed inner suburbs of Montgomery County.<\/p>\n

Don Phillips saw these people a lot as the campaign headed into summer, and as Dayton prepared for its moment in the sun, hosting the first presidential debate last September. They came to party headquarters at the Mandalay to pick up Trump signs. But, he said, marveling: \u201cThese are not Republicans.\u201d Or not Republicans as he\u2019d known them. They were no one\u2019s constituency, until now.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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