How a small Ohio town became the 'center of gravity' in the GOP's realignment

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11 hours ago

CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — The Republicans came on Good Friday, condemning corporate America and rallying locals to have faith that their city's paper mill could somehow be saved.
One by one, in the shadow of Pixelle Specialty Works' towering red- and white-striped smokestack, they unloaded on the Miami-based private equity firm that plans to close it this summer.
H.I.G. Capital, said Sen. Jon Husted, was ignoring the personal toll on more than 800 employees here.
'If the private equity firms who do this to communities had to go walk through and look at every one of you in the eye and hear your stories and see the devastation that they cause when they make selfish decisions,' Husted said, 'they would never do what they do.'
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost aimed his iPhone at the crowd and snapped a picture, which he declared 'Exhibit A' in any potential courtroom fight.
'You just heard from the good cops,' Yost said of the politicians who had spoken before him. 'Meet the bad cop.'
And Sen. Bernie Moreno, who organized the April event after writing a letter that blasted ownership as 'Wall Street elites' possessed by 'corporate greed,' shared details from his phone conversation that morning with an H.I.G. official. The mill, Moreno said, had survived the Civil War, two World Wars and the Great Depression.
'It has to be able,' Moreno added, 'to survive a private equity company.'
A decade ago, such public shaming of the private sector by GOP officeholders would have been unthinkable. But the uproar around Chillicothe reflects a continuing political realignment under President Donald Trump, whose economic populism has shaken Republicans' pro-business coalition.
Moreno, a multimillionaire who made his money selling luxury cars, is emblematic of the shift. He won his seat last year with Trump's endorsement, defeating Sen. Sherrod Brown, a three-term Democrat known for his populist, pro-labor views. Republicans painted Brown and other Democrats as elitists out of touch with places like Chillicothe and surrounding Ross County, where Trump and Moreno both won in 2024.
'It's the most interesting political shift that I've ever seen,' Moreno said in an interview. 'The center of gravity for the Democratic Party is Martha's Vineyard. The center of gravity for the Republican Party is Chillicothe, Ohio.'
Pixelle announced plans to shutter the Chillicothe mill in April, triggering the Moreno-led stampede to town days later. The company has seen a decreased demand for the carbonless paper made there as the use of digital receipts and invoices becomes more common.
'We are committed to working closely with local, state, and federal officials to explore future opportunities for the site, including the potential for a new owner and/or eventual redevelopment,' Pixelle wrote in an statement provided to NBC News.
The effort to save the mill, or to at least ensure a new employer can take it over as quickly as possible, hit a snag this month. H.I.G. and Pixelle reneged on an agreement to pause the shutdown timeline and keep the factory open through the end of the year — a reprieve that would have bought time to identify a new tenant or use for the property. It had been the one shred of good news Moreno delivered at his April rally.
'Bernie has been the face of this,' said Jai Chabria, a longtime Republican strategist in Ohio. 'Whether he's successful or not is not the measure of where we are. If you look back at the Republican Party of 20 years ago, this is certainly not where a wealthy Republican senator would be expected to lead. Bernie has really embraced where the party has gone.'
Even so, Katie Seewer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party, faulted Republicans for 'the latest in a long streak of bad economic news' in the state, noting that Moreno had raised hopes that the mill's closure wouldn't happen this year.
'Republicans own these failures and many others that have created an economy that isn't working for Ohio,' Seewer added.
Pixelle is scheduled to end all Chillicothe operations by Aug. 10. The workers there — many of them second- and third-generation paper mill employees — are now waiting to see how much of the tough talk from Moreno and his colleagues leads to action.
'Bernie's railing against private equity,' said Scott Wiesman, who has worked at the mill for 30 years. 'But if you Google it, he's invested in private equity. So how evil is it, Bernie?'
Mayor Luke Feeney, a Democrat, gives Moreno more credit.
'My hope and belief is that his efforts have been genuine and sincere,' Feeney said. 'All of those guys that got up there and on that stage said, 'We will sue them if they do this to you' — I hope they stick to it, and until they don't, I'm good with it.'
But, Feeney added, 'if it turns out that it was just a dog-and-pony show, then I'll be pretty frustrated, because we're left with the aftermath here.'
Chillicothe, about an hour's drive south of Columbus, has a proud history as Ohio's first state capital. Today, it has a population of roughly 22,000, a promising tourist economy boosted by the nearby Hopewell earthworks and mounds, and a redeveloped downtown that Feeney holds up as a small-town success story.
Less than a mile from Pixelle, bustling Paint Street features two craft breweries, a boba house and other trendy businesses tucked into tidily restored storefronts. The name of a hip cafe, Paper City Coffee, pays tribute to one of the town's top employers. (Countywide, the mill is the third-largest source of jobs, behind the regional hospital system and a Kenworth Trucks plant.)
The mill is 'as much a part of the scenery as the hills and everything else around here,' said Michael Throne, the head of the Chillicothe Ross Chamber of Commerce, who recalled his first glimpse of the smokestack when driving to town for a job interview years ago.
'I'd seen smokestacks before,' Throne said. 'But nothing that towered over the landscape of the city.'
Chillicothe's papermaking days date to 1812. For more than 100 years, the city was a hub for Mead, a company that would become a household name in school and office supplies.
'The paper mill really supported southeast Ohio,' said Jeff Allen, president of the United Steelworkers Local 731, which represents Pixelle workers. 'They used to tell us that for every job in the mill, there were three outside the mill.'
Over time, Mead's name slowly disappeared. Market forces — a world less reliant on paper, a tangle of mergers and acquisitions — kept bouncing the old mill into new investment portfolios. In 2022, H.I.G. purchased what four years earlier had been rebranded as Pixelle.
'We were Mead kids. Our kids were Mead kids,' said Tim Jenkins, a mill employee for 38 years. 'With the strike in '75, you walked through the lunch line, you could get a free lunch when you said, 'I'm a Mead kid.''
'Little things like that you never forget.'
Feeney, who grew up in Seattle and moved to Chillicothe after graduating from law school in Cleveland, was elected mayor in 2015. National Democrats, eager to project strength in conservative-leaning parts of the Midwest, gave him a speaking slot at their convention the following year.
Back then, Feeney estimated, the paper mill accounted for about 13% of the city's income tax receipts. The number has dropped to about 8%, reflecting a more diverse local economy, but also a shrinking workforce. Feeney could never shake the thought that the mill's narrow focus wouldn't age well.
'In the back of my mind, I figured that there was some chance that the paper mill won't be around forever,' he said. 'Paper might not be used in a hundred years.'
Despite obvious signs of decline, Pixelle's announcement that it would close the mill came as a shock. No one wanted to believe the worst.
'We saw changes in how they were running the business, and you could tell that wasn't sustainable,' said Allen, who has worked at the mill for 37 years. 'But I don't think anybody thought it was going to truly close. We just thought we would recover — they would make changes, and it would straighten itself out.'
While the Pixelle news was gutting, if not entirely unexpected, Moreno's interest in taking on its owners came as a much bigger surprise.
Once a swing state, Ohio has heavily favored Republicans in recent elections. But in 2012, voters in the state backed President Barack Obama after being inundated with ads and messaging that characterized his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, as a soulless businessman. Specifically, the ads tied Romney's work in private equity to job losses in Ohio and across the industrial heartland. Republicans at the time dismissed such tactics as attacks on capitalism.
'My political thinking certainly evolved from the Mitt Romney time to today,' Moreno said. 'While Mitt Romney and the people at Bain Capital made a lot of money doing that, they also caused a lot of damage. Fundamentally, that's wrong, and that's not the way Republicans saw things back then.'
Moreno said he first learned of plans to close the mill from a car dealer in Chillicothe and described his reaction as 'quite frankly, just pissed off.' He directed his staff to make the issue a priority. His deputy state director, a Chillicothe native, recently moved back to the city.
'I was bowling, my phone rings,' Allen recalled. 'This guy says he's from Bernie Moreno's office, that Bernie's going to come to town. I said, 'Listen, I'm in a bowling league, can I call you back?' I thought, 'You know what? I better listen to this.' But I was suspect of it.'
Feeney recalled reading Moreno's strongly worded letter that demanded answers from the owners: 'I don't think I disagreed with anything in it.'
But the reprieve that Moreno's saber-rattling helped win was even more short-lived than expected. Less than two months after the Good Friday rally, Pixelle issued an updated notice that the mill would close within 60 days — not, as owners had pledged, at the end of the year.
'I would prefer not to shut down at all, but, remember, I have no leverage,' Moreno said. 'There's no tool in my toolbox where they had to listen to me.'
Moreno said H.I.G. instead 'offered up an alternative that was workable' and that could involve transferring the land to a community organization free of environmental concerns. Such an arrangement could make it easier to reuse or redevelop the site. Feeney described such a situation as ideal. But the mayor worries about the site becoming home to a low-staffed data center.
'I don't want to see hundreds of acres and 20 employees,' Feeney said.
State and local officials also remain engaged, prepared to assist in talks to sell or redevelop the site and to help match displaced workers with new jobs.
Many note an anticipated surge in other skilled manufacturing jobs in the wider region. There are plans for new semiconductor, drone and electric vehicle battery plants all within about a 45-minute drive from Chillicothe.
There also remains hope, especially among Pixelle workers, that the site can continue as a paper mill, with corrugated cardboard and other packaging materials mentioned as a possibility if carbonless is no longer an option. Representatives from three large paper companies have toured the mill but found it unsuitable for their needs, Moreno said.
'They all kind of told me the same thing,' he added. 'The patient's too far gone' because of lack of proper investments.
The experience has been instructive, Moreno said. He has ordered his staff to conduct 'a full audit of Ohio companies' that in the coming years might find themselves in a situation similar to Pixelle's and identify ways to intervene before it's too late.
'I don't want to play Whac-A-Mole,' Moreno said. 'I want to be proactive and avoid the next 20 Chillicothes.'
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com