Tylar Sutton
"Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America" by David Giffels
Many American families have made a pact — to not talk about politics. It easily becomes divisive, but not dialoguing about our different views means we aren’t bridging the divide. To determine how we got here and seek hope for the future, award-winning Akron writer David Giffels did what is seldom done — listen to Ohioans on all parts of the political spectrum. Through his new book, “Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America (Hachette Books, $28),” we can listen too.
The title is bold, but there’s a reason to look to our state as a gauge for the Nov. 3 presidential election — Ohio has chosen the winner in 29 of 31 presidential elections since 1896, more than any other state. To capture diversity, Giffels met with voters throughout what pundits call “the five Ohios”: the dense industrial and postindustrial Northeast, the agricultural Northwest, the central area surrounding our capital, the sparse Appalachian Southeast and the conservative Southern-influenced Cincinnati region. Traveling over 4,000 miles, Giffels interviewed more than 100 Ohioans, including a women’s march participant, a struggling soybean farmer and his own son, a rookie Akron cop confronting the opioid epidemic. We talk to Giffels about his yearlong journey to understand America by searching for stories in Ohio, “The Heart of it All.”
The book ends as the coronavirus hits. How does your reporting shed light on the social issues that have emerged?
DG: The thing that recurred is how much people felt like they couldn’t communicate in an open healthy debate. People feel divided. When the pandemic happened, it pushed everyone further into silos. I refer to a project The New York Times covered where social scientists brought together Americans identified as covering the entire political spectrum. They put them in small groups and gave them current event topics. People left not feeling like their minds had been changed but feeling like they understood the other side better. I thought that was an incredibly healthy and hopeful thing. Now, you couldn’t do that. It worries me.
You addressed how Donald Trump got the working-class vote in 2016, and you interviewed laid-off GM workers in Lordstown last year. How did they feel then?
DG: There’s general trends that long-time union Democrats that voted reliably for Democratic candidates for president — their numbers shifted to Trump. In the wake of their plant closing and during that spring and summer [2019], every person who told me they fit that profile said they would not vote for Trump again. I’m not a pollster, but that’s what I was hearing. ... We saw this recently with Trump’s tweet about Goodyear and the uproar of response. Not just him, but national figures … they don’t know how personal that is for people [to be] insulting Goodyear or telling people in Mahoning Valley, Don’t sell your houses, ‘cause I’m gonna bring all the factory jobs back, but they’re not really taking action. I want this book to help [people] understand how in places that don’t have a loud voice, there are real personal emotional effects that happen as a result of national action and events.
A theme in the book is that people don’t feel heard. How did people respond when you listened to their stories?
DG: What I found late in my work was that this is really about people, not just individuals who don’t feel like they are being listened to or don’t feel they have a chance to be heard, but a larger region that feels that way. We are a flyover state with a lot of electoral votes that’s seen as a bellwether and the battleground, so every four years, a lot of people pay attention to Ohio. Often our narrative becomes outsiders telling us what our story is. There was a real energy that people were thankful to tell their own story. When one individual presents that opportunity, it offers hope for Ohio, as a state and for the Midwest, the flyover country as a region, that that can happen when people speak for themselves.
What do you hope people get from this book?
DG: What I hope is that they get a nuanced and complex picture of America. When you can look at individuals and see how they’re living their struggles and how they’re continuing to endure … then you can understand America. One of the most profound moments I had was when I was in Martins Ferry, and I was driving. The hills are on almost 90-degree rises, and you’re making hairpin turns. I’m thinking, They do this every day, and they choose to live there. It’s a very American thing to take on the challenge of something that could be done easier and to do it anyway because it is something you believe in.
