An EV plant bolstered by Biden’s climate law sparks hope in Northeast Ohio – but not a revival of its Democratic roots

CNN

By Phil Mattingly, Andrew Seger and Jeremy Moorhead, CNN

Lordstown, Ohio (CNN) — For this long-beleaguered region of Northeast Ohio, a gleaming new 2.8 million-square-foot manufacturing plant symbolizes something that has been fleeting in recent years: hope.

Hope that years of promises – so often broken or deferred – have been replaced by action in the form of 2,200 employees at the Ultium Cells electric vehicle battery plant, which sits at the forefront of cutting-edge green technology and manufacturing.

Hope in the shadow of the hulking former General Motors Lordstown plant that closed its doors in 2019, forcing workers like George Goranitis to leave the only jobs and homes they knew.

“All the mills shutting down, packers shutting down – the last thing here for a good-paying job was General Motors Lordstown,” Goranitis said.

The collapse of the lone remaining cornerstone of a manufacturing powerhouse cut to the heart of a proud community.

“Members, you know, weren’t able to handle some of the news,” Goranitis recalled. “And, you know, the situations they were in at that time, they took their own lives. There was divorces because of it. You know, families were ripped apart.”

The story of the GM plant closure in Mahoning Valley in Northeast Ohio isn’t new.

Nor is the story of how Donald Trump tapped into the anxieties within those communities with his bold promises to bring back the manufacturing prowess of old.

Here in Trumbull County, for decades a Democratic stronghold filled with union workers, President Barack Obama crushed Republican nominee Mitt Romney by 23 points in 2012.

Four years later, Trump flipped the county – the first Republican to do so in more than four decades – in a dramatic demonstration of strength among White blue-collar voters in the industrial Midwest.

He went on to win Trumbull County by an even greater margin in 2020, as Ohio, once the premier bellwether state, cemented its shift firmly into Republican hands.

Trump is once again the GOP nominee.

And he’s once again centering his campaign on big promises of a Midwestern manufacturing renaissance.

“We are going to bring so many auto plants into our country,” Trump boomed at an event this month in Michigan. “You’re going to be as big or bigger than you were 50 years ago.”

It’s a pitch that demonstrates his keen awareness that union voters – especially auto workers – hold the keys back to the White House in the critical states that form a political firewall through Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

It’s also one that highlights why the story of Lordstown – and the new electric vehicle battery plant located here – is such a critical window into this political moment.

Lordstown today represents singular convergence of political pledges broken and delivered, the pain and promise of economic transition, and the evolving tumult inside unions across the country that have experienced clear wins at the same moment rank-and-file members are shifting away from their long-standing support for the Democratic Party.

“Our plant, honestly, is a Trump plant,” Goranitis, who spearheaded the effort to organize the new Ultium plant where he now works, said of his union worker colleagues in a wide-ranging interview behind his UAW Local 1112 headquarters in nearby Warren.

Trump’s 2017 promise

When Trump arrived in nearby Youngstown in his first year as president, the Lordstown GM plant was already under clear signs of stress. That made Trump’s bold declarations all the more resonant with the community.

“Don’t move,” Trump said as he pledged to bring jobs back to the region. “Don’t sell your house.”

Many of the plant’s workers took Trump’s words literally, according to David Green, who served as the local UAW president during Trump’s term in office.

Seventeen months later, GM announced that the plant would be idled. Employees who wanted to hold on to their pensions would be required to relocate to other GM facilities. Houses were sold. Many moved. Others were forced to commute each week to the new locations, leaving their families to do so.

Trump railed against the GM leadership on Twitter and urged some kind of deal to reopen the plant.

But Green said his letters to the White House pleading for help were ignored – at least until he appeared on Fox News to make his case.

Trump was watching.

Shortly after, he fired off a tweet aimed squarely at Green.

“Democrat UAW Local 1112 President David Green ought to get his act together and produce,” the president wrote. “G.M. let our Country down, but other much better car companies are coming into the U.S. in droves. I want action on Lordstown fast. Stop complaining and get the job done!”

It was a heady moment for Green, who like so many others had followed his father onto the GM Lordstown factory floor and had spent his whole career there until the plant closed.

“I ignored it because my mama told me, ‘Don’t give it any credibility, and it goes nowhere,’” Green said. “The reality is my daughter got bullied over that. And I didn’t know until just a couple of years ago when she told me. She was a senior in high school, and kids were blaming me and mad at her and bullying her.”

Trump then eagerly touted the start-up Lordstown Motors as the savior he was instrumental in delivering.

He dispatched his vice president, Mike Pence, to tour the facility in 2020 with cameras in tow.

A few months before that fall’s election, Trump held a major promotional event on the South Lawn of the White House, flanked by prototypes of what the company pledged would be the first all-electric commercial pickup truck.

“The area was devastated when General Motors moved out, and then we worked together, and we made the deal on the plant,” Trump said as he stood beside the company’s chief executive.

The company would go on to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy three years later.

The executive who stood beside Trump would eventually settle with federal regulators over claims that he misled investors about demand for the first all-electric commercial pickup truck. He did not admit any wrongdoing.

Ultium breaks ground

Given the past several years, there was an understandable skepticism in the community when the new joint venture between GM and South Korea’s LG started construction on its planned electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant, which opened in 2022.

Standing inside that plant this summer, Josh Ayers was candid about when he came to believe what the future could hold.

“Probably when they actually broke ground. I mean, honestly,” Ayers said. When Ayers left the GM plant and his hometown, he never expected to find an opportunity to return to either.

“This gives people in the Valley another chance,” Ayers said as he ticked through the reasons people from here so deeply value the community, from friends and family to the familiar (and highly recommended) local restaurants such as Wedgewood Pizza and the Hot Dog Shoppe.

That Ayers was standing inside a cutting-edge technological plant like Ultium was one thing.

That he was standing next to Kareem Maine, the plant director who for many months had sat across from him during intense negotiations over the plant’s union contract, was another.

The ratification of their agreement in June marked just the latest critical development inside a plant that in many ways has laid the groundwork for an expanding industry.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day like you look around, but you really have to take the time, step back and say, ‘Hey, we accomplished a lot in a short period of time,’” Maine said.

Those accomplishments have been closely watched by the current Oval Office inhabitant, who was quick to congratulate Ayers and his team after the agreement.

“Five years ago, the previous administration made false promises to Lordstown workers – and then stood by as the community lost jobs and faced economic devastation,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “Today, Lordstown is a comeback story and it didn’t happen by accident.”

The Ultium plant started production just two weeks after Biden signed into law a sweeping clean energy investment package.

A record of results

The Biden administration has utilized its major legislative wins to bolster Ultium’s efforts to the tune of billions of dollars in grants and funding assistance.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are also unapologetically pro-union, with Biden regularly touting his view that he’s the most “pro-union president in history.”

“I agree with that,” Green said.

While UAW leaders, both national and local, pressed Biden and Harris for more aggressive action on the union’s behalf throughout the past several years of negotiations, their role in the eventual results drove emphatic national endorsements.

And the results are real, bolstering UAW President Shawn Fain’s strike strategy that led to a historic agreement with the Big Three automakers.

But it was the Ultium plant’s inclusion in that agreement – once viewed as a nonstarter in the negotiations – that was truly game-changing here in Northeast Ohio.

In total, wages for the plant’s workers were nearly doubled over the length of the agreement.

Safety standards that would serve as the barometer for all future agreements were locked in.

Most importantly, the GM Lordstown employees who were forced to transfer in 2019 had a clear path back home.

“I teared up quite a few times having these conversations with my brothers and sisters that I used to work with here in Lordstown,” said Goranitis, who started with GM out of high school and spearheaded the organizing effort at the new plant. “They never thought it was going to happen.”

Fain was given a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the story of Lordstown was elevated.

The UAW endorsed Harris and aggressively pushed out video of her appearance on the picket line as a senator and Democratic presidential hopeful in 2019 and her support of unions.

But on the ground here, that record of results hasn’t had a dramatic effect with rank-and-file workers.

“A lot of the members that I do speak with, they say at the time that Trump was in office that just our economy at that time, the jobs were better at that time and businesses were booming,” Goranitis said.

Goranitis, thrust into a leadership position after his efforts over the last few years, is now grappling with the complexities many in UAW leadership are confronting in the months before Election Day.

He won’t tell his members how to vote, but he is trying to explain his view that Harris and Democrats have been better for his members. The results here are, at least on their face, clear-cut.

And yet.

“It’s a hard time right now, right? Because, you know, the unions have always backed Democrats,” Goranitis said. “Always have. And it does look like it’s starting to take a turning point.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.