There is an excellent article over at the Monthly Review written by James Straub, its titled, “What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt”

Straub does a standup job at explaining why a state that throughout Bush’s first term, constantly vied with Michigan for the dubious honor of most jobs lost. Ohio, where hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000 were largely high-wage, stable, union jobs, which served as employment multipliers in the larger local economy. A state that since 1950 has lost nearly 50 percent of its population and has one of the poorest cities in the country; Cleveland Ohio. And how a town like Youngstown, once known for its blue collar middle-class mobility, is now called Yompton by the town’s youth. Yompton is in reference to the economic and cultural devastation of South Compton L.A.

Straub also explains the history of the labor movement in Ohio, the influence that the evangelical movement has now on the state , and where Ohio may be heading.
He asks the question; is this what is in store for the rest of the rust belt and the nation?

His conclusions may surprise you.

What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Beltby James Straub

It was a fittingly ironic end to an election full of grotesque twists: When George W. Bush was narrowly reelected president of the United States, it was the electoral votes of the state he had harmed most that gave him the final nudge across the finish line. Ohio went for the second election in a row to the Republican clown prince. But if the first Bush victory was tragedy, the one in 2004 was surely farce: has world history ever turned before on the artful elevation of gay bashing to an electoral tactic?
“In twenty-one years of organizing, I’ve never seen anything like this,” former trucker’s union organizer Phil Burress told the New York Times shortly after the election. “It’s a forest fire with a 100 mile-per-hour wind behind it.” Burress was speaking not of the efforts of unions and community organizations to register and turn out hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls in Ohio to vote against Bush, but of his crusade to mobilize even larger numbers to pass a state constitution amendment prohibiting gay marriage.

The demographics and causes of Bush’s slim victory in Ohio and the country continue to be debated—for instance, while 25 percent of Ohio voters identified themselves as white evangelicals (and 78 percent of them voted for Bush), the Washington Post’s number-crunching later revealed that the percentage of frequent church-goers voting in Ohio actually declined 5 percent in 2004—and Congressman John Conyers has documented evidence of electoral fraud that indicates Ohio my have been this election’s secret Florida. However, it remains undeniable that Bush’s Ohio victory did come in part from a massive outpouring of socially conservative evangelical Christians to the polls. A large majority of these Republican evangelicals were blue-collar Ohioans voting against their self-interest, many mobilized by Burress’s anti-gay marriage amendment.

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