President Donald Trump went back to Ohio to rally support for Republicans in the Rust Belt, where entire sections of a hockey arena sat mostly empty, and some of the voters who helped power his rise say they’ve stopped buying what he’s selling.
The Washington Post reported that the upper levels of Youngstown’s Covelli Centre, home to the Phantoms junior hockey team, were largely empty during the rally, and Trump, who often brags about the size of his crowds, said nothing about the attendance.
Former Trump voters in the onetime steelmaking powerhouse told the Post they see a growing disconnect between their own struggles with grocery, housing and gas prices and the president’s embrace of artificial intelligence and the data centers proposed across the region.
“I hate [AI and data centers] with a passion,” said William Akel, a 26-year-old soda delivery driver from nearby Niles who voted for Trump in 2020 but backed Kamala Harris in 2024. “AI is going to take the jobs, and then what jobs are we going to have? Probably fixing the AI?”
“I think he’s just lost in the sauce,” Akel added. “He sees [AI] as a way to make more money. … They’re putting billions and billions into all that. Where’s it all coming from? You’ve got people starving here.”
Brian, a 54-year-old from Liberty who voted for Trump in all three of his elections, lost his welding job of roughly 25 years and called the local job market a “ghost town.”
“I’m extremely disappointed in him,” he told the Post. “I fell for it.”
He now plans to vote only in local races, and he also doubts Trump’s promise that tech companies will cover the extra electricity costs that come with data centers.
“We’re going to pay for all of this,” he said. “We always do.”
That frustration is bad news for Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), who faces a challenge from Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown. In an August memo obtained by the Post, the National Republican Senatorial Committee called data centers “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.” A recent New York Times/Siena poll found voters trust Brown over Husted on the issue by 11 points.
At a Husted rally nine days earlier, the crowd went noticeably quiet as Trump praised data centers. “We want them,” he said. “Look, there’s so much money to be made for Ohio, you can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China.”
On Monday, Trump steered clear of the topic and talked up Husted’s football career instead, at one point saying he “looked at his a--,” and he went after Somali and Haitian immigrants. He also claimed Ohio’s steel industry is “roaring back to life” and repeated that he has brought in $21 trillion in investment, a figure NBC News reported is nearly double the $11.2 trillion tallied on the White House’s own website.
Even Mike Loychik, a 63-year-old loyal Trump supporter who plans to vote for Husted, admitted he’s frustrated.
“He seems like he talks about himself more than the issues,” Loychik said. “So it’s kind of a turnoff right now.”