Politico Magazine: ‘I Am the Woman Trump Hates’: Meet Sherrod Brown’s Louder Half

• Her path to this point has not been a straight line. Schultz was a freelance writer until she was 36. She was on the staff at Cleveland’s Plain Dealer as a features writer when she was a single mother. When she became a columnist for the newspaper, in 2002, first she called her kids and then she called her father. “Finally,” Chuck Schultz joked. “You’re going to get paid for what you’ve been throwing around for free …” But he was proud, and she could hear it. He went to the Crow’s Nest, his regular bar where he drank his Stroh’s and his Schlitz, and he told all his pals. “Imagine that,” he often said. “Getting a paycheck to give everyone a piece of her mind.” Her first column was about the lunch pail he took to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company for 36 years—as a member of the Utilities Workers of America, Local 270.
• Since then, of course, it’s only gotten harder to be someone like Chuck Schultz, somewhere like Ashtabula, a town whose name means “always enough fish to be shared” and is bleeding population due to a loss of industrial jobs. He died in 2006, and his daughter doesn’t think he would have voted for Trump, but he was a part of the portion of the electorate that did so in droves. “I am not going to mock Trump voters,” she told me. “Because so many of them—they are desperate right now. For many reasons that are not their fault. Companies leaving. Companies abandoning them. And moving out of the country, right? Bottom line: I’m not going to mock them because I’m related to some of them.”
• She called it “an issue of betrayal.”
• “I come from the people he’s exploited and misled and lied to,” she said of Trump. “He made them think he cared about them. They were pawns on a board for him. But they believed him. And I understand. … I’ve known men like my dad all of my life. I know these voters, a lot of them.” And they have gone from “important” and “mighty” and “strong” … to “forgotten.”
• “And he made them think that he saw them,” she said. “And he was looking right past them. He just thought, ‘I need you, you, you, you’—he doesn’t want to shake their hands, he doesn’t want to go out and mingle with them, he’s not inviting them to the White House. … They wore their bodies out so we didn’t have to. They wore their bodies out. My dad had heart bypass surgery at age 48—48. And he already felt like an old man. What does Donald Trump know about that?”

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