MASSILLON, Ohio — At age 55, David Leasure has big hopes for his latest job application: as a bag boy in a local supermarket.
A victim of recent layoffs, the truck driver has gone 15 months without steady work. Now he's ready to swallow his pride and sack groceries for near-minimum wage -- if it means health benefits and sleeping at night.
In nearby Youngstown, steelworker Dennis Church has full-time work but nagging insecurity. A 50-year-old father of two, he has known of suicides and home foreclosures. He has seen laid-off friends leave Ohio, only to return and move in with their parents at age 45.
For Democratic candidates John F. Kerry and John Edwards, the battle for the Buckeye State in Tuesday's primary may come down to economics: who can best articulate a plan to revitalize a region hit hard by major manufacturers pulling up stakes and moving production work to Mexico and China.
Ohio has lost 272,000 jobs in the last three years -- more than half of them in manufacturing.
Factories aren't the only business in Ohio; nearly half the workers here are employed in such sectors as transportation, public administration and education. But manufacturing jobs, which account for 16% of employment -- down from 33% in the 1970s -- remain key to the state's identity.
As a result, both Kerry and Edwards have targeted blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt region just south of Lake Erie, an economically distressed area that has inspired country and western laments and a Bruce Springsteen ballad. They have listened to the woes of jobless workers at rallies staged at abandoned manufacturing plants and still-billowing factory smokestacks.
Polls show Kerry, the Democrats' national front-runner, with a comfortable lead here -- one bolstered by major union endorsements. He conducted a "Jobs Tour" last week in northern Ohio areas hit hardest by layoffs.
But Edwards has taken the fight directly to workers. The millionaire former trial attorney has played up his small-town roots and criticized Kerry for voting for the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement.
Edwards' TV ads include one called "American Jobs," and his speeches mention the closure of the South Carolina mill where his father once worked.
The ability of Kerry and Edwards to win votes here has broad implications for the general election because of Ohio's tradition as a "swing" state. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore here by less than 4 percentage points.
