YOUNGSTOWN, OH/CELINA, TN ­­– Trump signs in her backyard. Trump magnets on her refrigerator. Trump buttons on her dining room table. Kathy Miller is the Mahoning County chairwoman for Donald Trump.

While handing out Trump signs in June at a Republican headquarters just south of Youngstown, Ohio, she was approached by a woman in her late 80s, who said, “I have never voted Republican in my life. Give me the biggest sign you’ve got.”

In economically struggling communities like Mahoning County – where most steel mills have closed – many white, working-class Democrats are voting for Trump, registration records and 2016 presidential primary results show.

“They’re just all fed up,” Miller said. “It may be the economy for some, it may be the school systems, it could be health care, it could be immigration, education, it could be anything. They’re just fed up with the direction of our country. Mr. Trump showed up at the right time.”

Clay County, Tennessee, which borders Kentucky, used to be home to four garment factories. Celina, the county seat, had two. The largest of these factories was children’s clothing factory OshKosh, which employed between 1,500 and 2,000 from the 1950s to the 1990s. In a county with a population of between 7,000 and 8,000, everyone worked there or knew someone who did.

“Just about everybody who wanted a job, if they’d work, they had a job at OshKosh,” said Doug Young, director of the county’s Three Star Initiative, a program focused on improving the county’s infrastructure to bring jobs to the area.

The factory shut its doors in November 1996 and moved its operations to Mexico, taking advantage of the cheap labor options the North American Free Trade Agreement provided. The agreement’s purpose was to establish a free-trade zone in North America by lifting tariffs on a majority of goods the U.S., Mexico and Canada produce and trade with one another.

Almost overnight, unemployment spiked to nearly 30 percent as hundreds of northern Tennessee residents lost jobs.

Racoe Inc., a military fabric cutting company, moved into the old OshKosh factory in December 1997. Only six people now work in the 66,000-square-foot building.

The county worked to recover from the loss, and logging is now a valued industry in the heavily forested area. Log trucks pass through the small downtown several times an hour.

Unemployment in Clay County, which is nearly 97 percent white, has petered out to a little more than 5 percent in May 2016, just over the May national average of 4.7 percent.

Yet the county still has a 24 percent poverty rate and historically Democratic voters are switching to the Republican Party. In March’s Republican primary, Trump won Clay county 57.1 percent to Ted Cruz’s 17.1 percent and had more than double the votes of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Timothy Scott, the former Democratic chairman in Clay County, said older people come to retire in Clay County because of nearby Dale Hollow Lake, which attracts 3.2 million visitors to the county annually. Scott said more of these retirees tend to vote Republican, but he still attributes much of Trump’s appeal to his rhetoric.

“I think his popularity is (because) just everybody is mad, and he is saying what they feel,” he said. “There will be a lot of Democrats voting for him.”

While older generations have been moving into the community, Scott said young people in the area are leaving because there aren’t jobs once they graduate.

Young said Clay County voters feel ignored by politicians who they believe aren’t doing anything to bring jobs back to the area. “I really do think it’s this attitude that we lost our jobs and nobody’s really come to help us,” Young said.