At its peak, the Mahoning valley was once the beating heart of the US’s steel economy – a hardscrabble, heavily unionized Democratic bastion in north-eastern Ohio. But de-industrialization, sparked by the mass closure of steel mills in the late 1970s, transformed the region.

Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared. Populations declined. And support for Democrats slowly, but surely, faded. In 2020, Mahoning county voted for its first Republican presidential candidate – Donald Trump – in a generation.

This extraordinary political shift in Ohio – a one-time presidential battleground – catalyzed years of commentary and critique about how the state’s “working class” had abandoned the Democratic party. Then came the results on Tuesday night.

Ohio elected a Democratic senator, eight Democrats to the House of Representatives and the state’s first Democratic governor in 16 years.

But before any discussion of how Ohio’s “working class” has come home, historians and political scientists said such framing is too simple.

The idea that Democrats “lost” a monolithic block of voters in Ohio in the first place is a “false narrative”, according to Michael Pierce, a labor historian at the University of Arkansas. “A lot of commentators confuse the white working class with the working class.”

Republican gains in recent years came among the state’s rural white working class, through “a politics of grievance, of culture wars, of scare tactics”, Pierce said.

What does “working class” even mean? Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at the Ohio State University, is unsure. Blue-collar work, lacking a college degree and union membership are “almost completely unrelated categories”, he said.

Sorting by income does not help much either, he said. “A Nepali immigrant who works at a McDonald’s in Columbus is very different from a 60-year-old person in the middle of nowhere in rural Ohio,” Kogan said. “But they would both be lower income.”

On Tuesday, Democrats including Amy Acton, soon to be the state’s next governor, and Sherrod Brown, the populist who lost his Senate seat two years ago, and Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker who ran on a “workers first” platform, scored extraordinary victories as the party’s blue wave swept through Ohio.

Such results “suggest more of a latent solidarity within the Rust belt than we’ve talked about previously”, said Laura Bucci of St Joseph’s University.

The economic focus of Democratic campaigns “met the moment” for blue-collar voters frustrated with sustained affordability issues, said Bucci. “Everything has felt expensive and hard.”

“I am an independent. I vote by the issues,” Jim Conrad, a retired school teacher in Columbus, said earlier this week. “I’m tired of billionaires. The gap between the wealthiest and the poor in this country has gotten bigger each year.”

David Stebenne, a historian at Ohio State, described not one, but two, working classes. The “upper” one – steelworkers and autoworkers in unionized plants – could once afford houses, cars and college for their children, he suggested. Many of these families “have sunk back downward” during de-industrialization.

Below them is a “lower” working class in low-wage service jobs, Stebenne said. Ohio’s median household income, once close to the national figure, has fallen well below it – which makes rising prices for fuel and food hit harder.

Before the election, Stebenne told anyone who asked that if regular gas was still above $4 on election day, the Republicans were likely going to do very poorly. And this time, instead of Trump helping to turn out people who don’t typically vote, he said, Trump’s low approval rating was “an anchor” for Republicans.

Acton spent the final days of her campaign for Ohio governor describing herself the same way at every stop: “scrappy”, and from Youngstown.

Youngstown, the largest city in the Mahoning valley, is shorthand in the Ohio political universe for regular working folks.

Acton, who has spoken about living in a tent as an unhoused 12-year-old, used that story to signal that she was not the kind of Democrat who grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class suburb. She drove herself around the state for most of the campaign while Vivek Ramaswamy, her Republican opponent, flew by private jet.

At rallies, she described her Youngstown upbringing as one in which political parties didn’t matter, but that union affiliation and civic group membership did, hearkening back to a time when labor was central to identity.

In the Mahoning valley, “you can see how labor feels about politics”, added Raymond Irwin, also a historian at Ohio State. “Through that region you can see the whole state’s disenchantment with the collapse of industry.”

The county’s support for Trump continued to grow after he visited in 2017, telling residents: “We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories.” This week, amid growing frustration over the president’s handling of the economy, Acton won the county 54% to 42%.

Brown, meanwhile, framed his race as working Ohioans against billionaires, and focused on datacenters. He called incumbent Republican senator Jon Husted “the face of datacenters”, blamed him for the 226 now operating in Ohio, attacked their tax breaks and tied them to soaring electricity bills.

“Datacenters aren’t about workers; they’re about replacing workers,” Pierce said, noting how Brown was “tapping into all of these anxieties about jobs”.

Brown, from Mansfield in Richland county, is in an older tradition of Ohio labor politics, according to Pierce. “He comes from the politics of the 60s and 70s, when the big labor unions really dominated Ohio politics,” he said. “And he knows how to talk that talk, and he does it really well.”

But Brown’s criticism of datacenters is at odds with some building trades unions, which have backed datacenter construction, and in recent years drifted toward Republicans.

From the 1930s through the 1980s, organized labor was the main financial and organizational pillar of the Ohio Democratic party. But union membership in the state has fallen from about 36% of workers in the late 1970s to between 11% and 12%, Irwin said.

Pierce sees a comeback led by public-sector and service unions, and said the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)’s work for Acton, Brown and a string of House candidates this year was a throwback to the 1960s and early 1970s.

But not everyone is convinced that this week’s results mark another long-term shift in Ohio’s politics, back from red to blue.

“There’s a good chance this is a high-water mark for Democrats,” Kogan said, recalling how the party’s 2006 wave in Ohio was erased by the Tea Party in 2010.

It is not yet clear whether the party’s revived fortunes in the state will last for long. “Something is in the air,” said Pierce. “And I just can’t piece it together yet.”

The true test will come next year, Irwin suggested, when the voters who tried Trump Republicanism, only to turn to Brown and Acton, start asking what they have gotten for it. “We’re not going to snap their fingers and get the lower costs that we’re hoping for,” he said.