It’s tough to beat the prices at Golden Dawn, an Italian restaurant that first opened its doors in 1932 on the north side of Youngstown, Ohio, and where a hamburger and fries today goes for $7 and a domestic beer just $2 at happy hour.

But the price that’s most discussed these days around its neon-lit, crescent-shaped bar is the $5 a gallon that gas prices are nearing at stations across this north-eastern Ohio city that is one of the state’s most prominent victims of manufacturing disinvestment. Where people differ is about what caused it, and who should take the blame.

“It’s because of that damn war” with Iran, said Tom Goodman, a 47-year-old who works odd jobs around town. An independent, he was never a fan of the president, but now thinks even less of him. “Trump can go ride back into the sunset on whatever white horse he rode in one because he didn’t help the country,” he said.

On the opposite side of that argument is Chris Vitello, who owns a contracting firm and described himself as “a very pro Trumper”.

“I’m not too worked up about this Iran war thing right now. I know it’ll come to an end,” he said. “We’ll get the straits open,” he said, referring to the strategic Middle Eastern waterway at the heart of the global oil supply crunch. “Oil’ll come down rapidly, The markets will shoot up. The economy, I think, is about to burst open.”

Its a microcosm of a debate that will play out in the months to come across Ohio, which lies at the center of Democrats’ hopes of retaking control of Congress in the midterm elections and hobbling Trump’s legislative agenda. The Buckeye state is home to a marquee Senate race in which Sherrod Brown, a Democratic former senator who lost re-election in 2024, is vying to unseat Republican incumbent Jon Husted – an uphill battle in a state that Trump has won three times straight and with bigger margins each time.

On Tuesday, the state will hold primaries in which Brown and his opponent Husted are expected to win their party’s nominations for the Senate special election set to be held during the November midterms. The winner will serve the final two years of the term JD Vance won in 2022, which Husted, then Ohio’s lieutenant governor, was appointed to fill after Vance became vice-president.

Democrats believe this year will be different. Trump won’t be on the ballot, but the Republicans who supported his policies will, and Democrats are hoping that voters take out the frustration that polls indicate they are feeling on the president’s allies, even in states like Ohio.

“We haven’t had any success in a long time,” said Chris Redfern, who chaired Ohio’s Democratic party when Barack Obama carried it in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. “For me, it feels like there is a wave coming, and I’m not sure there’s anything Donald Trump and the Maga right can do to stop it.”

The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, has named Ohio as one of four states his party is targeting to win back the majority in Congress’s upper chamber, and campaigning is expected to become fervent and expensive. The Senate GOP’s Super Pac has announced it will spend $79m in Ohio, and the equivalent Democratic Super Pac is expected to follow suit.

Both candidates’ roads to victory likely run through Youngstown and the greater Mahoning valley, a region long synonymous with blue-collar struggles.

Brown has cast himself as a defender of such voters throughout his long political career, which began when he won election to the state legislature in 1974, after which he served two terms as Ohio secretary of state, then a stint in the US House of Representatives, before winning election to the Senate in 2006.

But the working class has shifted away from the party over the past decade, and the once solidly Democratic counties of the Mahoning valley have followed. In 2024, they rejected Brown in favor of Republican Bernie Moreno, a consequence, he said in an interview, of Trump winning Ohio by 12 percentage points that year.

“Late in the campaign, [Trump] said, ‘If you vote for Sherrod Brown, you’re voting against me,’ and we couldn’t really answer that,” Brown said.

Now a 73-year-old former senator who, if he wins, will have relatively little time before he has to decide if he wants to stand for a full term in 2028, Brown acknowledges that his message to voters has changed little. In a speech to supporters gathered at a brewery outside Youngstown, he described Husted as a politician who has stood aside as Trump prosecuted war with Iran and drove up gas prices, and cast himself as a fighter for lower costs.

“It’s who I am. It’s why I’m running. It’s to take on special interest groups,” Brown said. “People want somebody that will fight back. And fighting back means taking on the drug companies, taking on Wall Street, taking on the insurance companies and taking on big oil. And Jon Husted has sided with them on everything, and that’s a big reason prices keep going up.”

A spokesperson for Husted declined to comment.

It is unclear if that rhetoric will be enough, even with the president off the ballot. Polls of Brown and Husted’s contest have shown a close race, and Ohio Democrats who have adopted similar strategies have nonetheless failed in the Trump era. Paul Sracic, a longtime political science professor at Youngstown State University who is now a senior fellow at the right-leaning Hudson Institute, said that Trump’s endorsement remains potent among his followers.

“There’s this faith in him that Donald Trump has that no president since FDR, I think, has had in voters, in that it’s very much about trusting him, and even when they disagree, they’re not going to abandon him,” Sracic said.

“He’s going to show up in places like the Mahoning valley, and he’s going to stump for Jon Husted, and that’s going to be powerful.”

But Republicans may have their own problems elsewhere on the ballot. The party’s voters are expected to nominate Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who made an unsuccessful bid for president in 2024, as their gubernatorial candidate. Democrats believe he will struggle for support in the state, boosting both the presumptive Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Amy Acton, and Brown.

Ohio is also grappling with the fallout from a long-running corruption scandal involving power company FirstEnergy that occurred during Husted’s time as lieutenant governor.

Husted appeared as a defense witness in the trial of two executives earlier this year, but has not been accused of wrongdoing. Nonetheless, Brown and his supporters have already brought it up in their campaigning, and it may be getting results.

“I just don’t like the guy. He just projects to me as a bullshit politician,” Marty McKenna, 79, said of Brown as he stopped at Golden Dawn for breakfast one morning.

“Christ, this is Youngstown. We’ve seen a million bullshit politicians. Look what happened to us. We’re a perfect example of being lied to,” he continued, before listing politicians he said promised the community a return to the days before the steel industry’s collapse in the 1970s led to a wave of factory closures and ensuing population loss from which the city has never recovered.

But he recently saw an ad linking Husted to FirstEnergy that gave him pause. “I liked him until I saw that ad,” McKenna said.

Two years ago, Ron Yacobony, 71, spurned both Trump and Kamala Harris to vote libertarian in the presidential race, but backed Moreno over Brown because he agreed with his conservative ideology. This year, he’s planning to vote straight Democratic, angry about what he sees as overreach by the president in his second term.

“Republicans are so way out of line … I have to go all Democrat. I try and change from time to time, depending on the situation, but we have to get some change in Washington, so I’m gonna go with as many Democrats as I can,” he said.

His wife, Darlene Yacobony, supported Trump and Moreno in 2024, but ahead of the midterms is considering voting Democratic.

“I like Trump, I voted for Trump, but I think he’s gone a little overboard this time,” she said.