Three-Time Trump Voter Flips After 1,400-Worker Ohio Factory Layoff Days Before Rally Where Trump Said the State Was 'Booming'

Kyle Bos voted for Donald Trump three times, holding up three inked fingers when asked. Now the 30-year-old father says he is finished with the president and will spend the final weeks before the 3 November midterms knocking on doors for Democrats.

His change of heart followed the loss of his job. Bos was among nearly 1,400 workers laid off on 30 September at the former Navistar truck factory in Springfield, Ohio. Three days later, Trump rallied nearby in Vandalia and assured supporters that their state was 'booming'.

'Something has to change politically in this country,' Bos, a United Auto Workers (UAW) member who calls himself a centrist, told the Associated Press. 'Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.'

His disillusionment is what Democrats are banking on. The cuts erased about a year of job growth across the greater Dayton area, a stretch of southwestern Ohio that spent decades losing factory work to Mexico and China before its frustration helped carry Trump to the White House. Should that coalition fray, it could decide a Senate majority Democrats cannot reach without flipping Ohio.

At the Vandalia rally on 3 October, his third in as many nights, Trump stumped for Republican Senator Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. 'Your state is booming,' he told the crowd. 'Every state is booming.' He also repeated a pledge to send $5,000 (£3,700) payments to households if Republicans hold Congress, which Bos dismissed as 'a bribe, a slap in the face.'

Much of the visit went to defending the data centres powering Trump's AI push, the issue Democrats have made Husted's heaviest liability, since the campuses he lured to Ohio as lieutenant governor have driven up electricity bills. 'There's so much money to be made for Ohio. You can't just turn them off. They'll go to China,' Trump said.

Husted acknowledged the state had endured 'hard times', recalling that his own father's factory once closed, before arguing Republicans had turned Ohio around.

Why the Springfield Plant Shut Its Doors

The shutdown owed more to a sale than a downturn. A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the state tied the losses to International Motors' deal to sell the Springfield Assembly Plant and Truck Specialty Center to Roshel, a Canadian armoured-vehicle maker.

The plant, open since 1966, had lately survived on contract work due to expire at September's end. International Motors said the sale was driven by that deadline and a wish to secure the site's future, 'not the result of tariffs or other broader economic factors.'

Roshel has pledged to 'more than double' the workforce over time, and several laid-off staff told the AP they expect to be recalled within six to 12 months.

A Senate Race on a Knife Edge

Husted, appointed to the seat vacated by Vice-President JD Vance, is defending it against Sherrod Brown, a former three-term Democrat seeking a return two years after losing to Republican Bernie Moreno.

The contest is level: Brown led by three points in a Suffolk University poll and eight in a Marist survey, with the Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball both rating it a toss-up. The Senate Leadership Fund alone has committed about $93M (£69M) to hold the seat, and the governor's race is just as close, with Ramaswamy trailing Democrat Amy Acton.

The White House calls the gloom misplaced, citing billions of dollars in investment it credits to Trump's tariffs, among them an $850M (£635M) Electra aerospace plant near Springfield. Even so, approval of his handling of the cost of living sits at just 17% in polling cited by the AP, and the Dayton area has lost about half of its 90,000 factory jobs since 1990.

For the laid-off workers, politics is secondary to the waiting. Marianne Donnelly, who drove a forklift at the plant, said she was buying marked-down meat and cancelling subscriptions to make ends meet. Bos, with a third child due in January, has traded the assembly line for a clipboard, intent on convincing his neighbours that change starts at the ballot box.