Mahoning County Republican Party Chairman Tom McCabe said that years ago he and Mark Munroe, a former party chairman, would routinely get calls from GOP leaders asking if it was possible for a statewide candidate to possibly do better than 35% in the county.

“If we got 36% for a candidate, we would celebrate because we did better than expected,” McCabe said. “It’s hard to envision what is happening now.”

What happened is Republicans have turned Mahoning and Trumbull, two of the most reliable Democratic counties in Ohio since 1936 – when the New Deal rescued the country from the Great Depression – red.

Trumbull is now a solid Republican county.

Mahoning is well on its way to getting there after Republicans won four out of six contested countywide executive branch races Tuesday, had Sheriff Jerry Greene switch from Democrat to Republican and had its incumbent candidates win a congressional race, a state Senate race and one of two state House seats. The other state House seat in Mahoning is drawn to heavily favor Democrats.

When McCabe was trying to figure out what races to put financial resources into, he said: “This is Mahoning County, and I’m checking off Congress, state Senate and state representative as races I don’t have to worry about. We are a red county. We hold a majority of countywide offices for the first time since 1928. Long past are the days where we were struggling to find candidates. Now, we’re the dominant party.”

Marleah Campbell, Trumbull County Republican Party secretary, said: “This is now two straight elections where Trumbull County Republicans were able to pull off victories in every race on the ballot.”

Some political names in Trumbull County are so well known that they’re almost iconic: Latell, Melfi, Polivka, O’Brien. Those Democratic families have been involved in county politics for decades with great success.

In 2022, Michael O’Brien lost a commissioner’s race to Republican Denny Malloy. O’Brien quickly rebounded the following year to win a councilman-at-large seat in Warren, one of the last Democratic communities in Trumbull County.

Recorder Tod Latell lost reelection Tuesday to Republican Dawn Zinni in a close race.

It wasn’t close for Dan Polivka, a former longtime county commissioner and county Democratic chairman, who suffered a 12.4% defeat to Republican Rick Hernandez in a commissioner race. James Melfi, who lost the 2023 Democratic primary for his long-held Girard mayoral seat, was defeated by 9.9% Tuesday by Republican Agostino Ragozzino.

Valley Republicans said the party was a sleeping giant for years, and people didn’t vote for their candidates because they had grown up in families of lifelong Democrats.

Donald Trump changed all of that when he ran in 2016. His campaign gave voice to an area that felt it had long been taken for granted by the Democratic Party while others contend Democrats have become too left for their tastes.

Even before Trump, longtime Democratic counties south of the Valley – particularly Jefferson and Belmont counties – left the party in the 2010 election, a banner Republican year, and have never returned. Columbiana, now bright red, was a Democratic-Republican tossup county about 15 years ago.

Bill Binning, retired Youngstown State University political science department chairman and a former county Republican chairman, said: “What we’ve seen from 2016 to this election is a realignment in Mahoning and Trumbull counties. They’ve become part of the Trump coalition. The last realignment was in the 1930s and that lasted for 80 years. This change will persist for quite a while.”

Binning said the “deindustrialization of the Mahoning Valley is at the root of this. A couple of generations ago, you had good industrial jobs.”

Binning said Trump deserves credit “as he gave voice to what was the dissatisfied working class. One underlying cause is the change in the economy in the Valley. Those good-paying industrial jobs are gone. This anger and resentment in the Valley is channeled through Trump.”

Binning said, “I’ve always found the Mahoning Valley to be socially conservative. They voted Democratic but had generally more conservative values, and that helped them align with the new Trump Republican Party.”

Those values and an attraction to a populist politician who articulated those issues led to the rise of James Traficant Jr., the former Mahoning Valley congressman who, as a Democrat, often fought with his own party, Binning said.

“Traficant was the precursor to Trump,” he said.

Binning added: “It’s a new political world in the Mahoning Valley.”

Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman Chris Anderson said Trump certainly had coattails that helped Republicans win in the area. But a big issue in Ohio, he said, is that Republicans who control the state have created policies that drive people out of the state.

“Our chief export is young talent,” he said.

Skolnick covers politics for

The Vindicator.