EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — People in this tiny village located on the state line with Pennsylvania long for nothing more than a return to normal, explained the village’s mayor, Trent Conaway, on the day of Vice President JD Vance’s visit.
Conaway expressed confidence that Ohio’s two new Republican U.S. senators, Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and John Husted (R-OH), who joined Vance along with Gov. DeWine (R-OH) on the two-year anniversary, will continue to be their warriors.
“I worked very closely with John Husted as the lieutenant governor and I’ve met with Bernie Moreno a bunch of times when he was running for the Senate and now as our senator. He’s definitely a caring individual who cares about our health and our future. He’s told me on multiple occasions, he has not forgotten about this town,” said Conaway.
Moreno said that getting results for the people who live in this village, who are often overlooked by the national media and entrenched politicians, is a top priority for him and his staff.
Moreno said that Vance framed it perfectly when he remarked that for decades there’s lots of places in America like East Palestine or western North Carolina that have been forgotten and ignored.
“Leaders have gone to Washington, D.C., and paid much more attention to foreign countries,” Moreno said. “We’re not going to keep focused on the needs of other countries. We’re going to focus on our own needs.”
Walk through East Palestine and there is plenty of evidence of small businesses stubbornly staying afloat after a disaster stripped their prosperity. Signs all along the street encourage people to stay strong and proud.
There are signs all over Main Street in businesses and in the flower planters along the sidewalk that read “We are East Palestine. Get ready for the Greatest Comeback in American History.”
The derailment site looks dramatically different than it did two years ago. But there are also empty storefronts. One abandoned building has a sign that reads, “East Palestine Lives Matter.”
Moreno said cities throughout the region, known colloquially as the “Mahoning Valley,” were once thriving industrial cities that have been hollowed out by terrible public policy.
“Whether it’s allowing China favorite trading status, whether it’s incentivizing companies to leave America and go to Mexico and Canada, especially in Ohio, around the auto industry, these cities have been gutted,” he explained.
“Then to make it worse, there’s this train disaster that, if not for JD Vance going there and bringing attention to it, would’ve been completely ignored. They will be ignored no longer,” Moreno said.
Moreno said the other scourge to hit Ohio is the fentanyl crisis: the illicit and deadly drug that originates in China and is then smuggled into our country illegally at border crossings with Mexico and Canada. Fentanyl caused the deaths of 100,000 Americans last year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not publish 2024’s numbers for several months.
“Look, we have troops on our southern border because we have fentanyl pouring across our country, and we’re going to make certain that Canada and Mexico do their part to stop the flow of fentanyl because again, it affects places like in those communities,” said Moreno.
The newly sworn-in senator, who was elevated to Ohio’s senior senator with Husted’s swearing-in late last month, said the lives and prosperity of Middle America are ultimately what the next four years of the Trump administration are going to be all about.
“Rebuilding America from the inside out,” he said.
Moreno defeated former Sen. Sherrod Brown in November, a progressive populist who had held public office in this state since 1975 in a variety of elected offices that included Ohio state representative and secretary of state, as well seven terms in the U.S. House and three in the U.S. Senate.
Much of that win came from robust support from the Mahoning Valley, which for decades had been the epicenter of working-class Democrats whose robust support for Democrats emerged during FDR as New Deal Democrats. The valley counties of Mahoning, Columbiana, Stark, and Trumbull had supported Democrats like candidate Barack Obama for president, Ted Strickland for governor, former congressman Tim Ryan, and Brown.
That support for Democrats began to crater in 2016 when President Donald Trump won all of them with the exception of Mahoning over Hillary Clinton coming shockingly close — she won the county with 49% of the vote; Trump had 46.9%. In contrast, four years earlier, Obama crushed Mitt Romney by 28 percentage points, earning more than 63% of Mahoning County’s vote.
By 2020, Trump had won Mahoning outright. Vance won it in his senate race over Mahoning Valley native Democrat Tim Ryan, who had represented several of the counties for nearly 20 years. Moreno won this past November over Brown who had carried it for decades.
Brown never debated Moreno during last cycle’s race, one of the most decisive and expensive in the country, which helped lift the Republicans into the majority in the U.S. Senate. Brown also never called Moreno to concede or congratulate him, something Bob Casey Jr. did with David McCormick in Pennsylvania and former Vice President Kamala Harris did with Trump.
Moreno said he could never get Brown to agree to debate with him.
“We were the only Senate campaign in the United States of America that did not have a debate. Sheldon Whitehouse had a debate. You couldn’t name his opponent,” he said of the Rhode Island Democrat’s race.
“Then election night comes, never called me. Then post-election, never called to help with the transition. Shut down all of his offices. Did not allow his constituent caseworkers to apply with us and then close all of his constituent cases,” he said.
Moreno said he hasn’t wasted any time working with the working-class and labor voters who once supported Brown to get things done.
“I have meetings this week with Shawn Fain, the Teamsters, the Building Trades Unions because there’s a lot of things that we can do together with those organizations to advocate for working Americans,” he said.
He said his team has also moved quickly to open offices for constituent services to meet the needs of Ohioans beginning with hiring a professional team to run the state district offices.
“We have built the largest state operation ever in Ohio,” he said of the partnership he built with the congressional delegation that puts their district office expansion to 21 district offices across the state.
The Associated Press reported that progressive activist groups, such as Indivisible, have organized and urged people to call in multiple times a day. This line-jamming led to people with congressional inquiries and pending casework with federal agencies making multiple calls a day, oftentimes reaching a busy signal.
Lawmakers themselves told the Associated Press they were frustrated as well.
In his farewell speech in mid-December, Brown told his Senate colleagues in a speech that he refused to call it a goodbye to politics. “It is not — I promise you — the last time you will hear from me,” he said.
Brown told CNN in mid-November of last year he would not rule out running for the Senate or for governor of Ohio in 2026. “I’m not dismissing anything at this point,” he said.
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Moreno smiled at the notion, then shrugged.
“You got to remember, for 50 years the guy’s been paid attention to,” he said. “He can’t give up the attention.”