It’s hard to find a piece of country more transformed in the past three decades than Northeast Ohio. Once the state’s union-voter heartland, later the site of the nation’s highest unemployment rate, the region has suffered Detroit-style population loss and pivoted toward Trump in 2016. The sense there is that from NAFTA to Nancy Pelosi, Democrats have left Ohio behind. “That brand is damaged. Our party is seen as coastal and elite, and that’s a big problem in a lunch-bucket state like this one,” says Rep. Tim Ryan, who has represented a gerrymandered puzzle piece of northeast Ohio for 15 years. Barack Obama won in the wave in 2008 and narrowly again in 2012 (likely thanks to the auto industry bailout). But with union membership in the state down by nearly a third since the millennium, the labor vote—like elsewhere—has been drifting out of Democrats’ camp. As if Clinton’s coal country gaffe wasn’t bad enough, Trump countered with promises to restore and protect factory jobs—and won the state’s union vote by 9 percentage points, according to exit polls. His appeal endures.

This thesis—that the Dems left Ohio behind—has some problems. First, if it’s Democrats who have a problem, why has Ohio diverged from its neighboring states? On paper, the state at first has much in common with Michigan and Pennsylvania: All three states are similarly white, similarly urban, similarly old, similarly educated, and with a similar number of union voters. But Ohio doesn’t have a metropolis on par with Detroit or Philadelphia. Parts of northern Michigan share the rural progressive tradition of Wisconsin and Minnesota; Ohio, meanwhile, is one-quarter southern and one-quarter Appalachian.

Another theory: Ohio was red all along.