At the campaign finish line in Springfield, the city that became an accidental main character

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On Monday morning, the day before whatever was going to happen would happen, a work crew was out in balmy weather stringing up Christmas lights on the tidy trees in downtown Springfield, Ohio. Later, they installed Christmas tree sculptures in a drained fountain behind City Hall, next to the artificial skating rink.

A police SUV was parked on the sidewalk in front of the municipal building. Just across the street, security cameras kept watch from atop a telescoping pole.

A couple of blocks away, they were bringing out their dead at Mother Stewart’s Brewery; it was closed on Mondays, and staff were packing up the Halloween decorations.

Lots of Springfielders give the same answer when you ask about their favourite place in town or what helped revitalize downtown: Mother Stewart’s. Brothers Kevin and John Loftis opened it in 2016, having both returned to their hometown after a couple of decades doing other things in far-flung places.

“I feel like we had some modest momentum. I felt like it was already starting to build a little bit – and I don’t just talk about downtown, but about everything,” Kevin said of the city. “But it feels like every time we say that, we just get kicked in the nuts.”

First it was the 2008 recession, then the pandemic. And then this fall, in the fetid hothouse of the presidential election, Springfield became an accidental main character in someone else’s fever dream, when Donald Trump and JD Vance claimed that immigrants were eating the pets there.

This city, like the entire Rust Belt, had been in long and gradual decline. In recent years, it’s attracted some new companies and breathed life back into a downtown that had become its own ghost, but there was a shortage of people to fill jobs.

Some Haitians arrived, and then many Haitians arrived. The best estimates are 12,000 to 15,000 in and around Springfield, which had 58,000 people to begin with.

Jobs were filled and businesses flourished. But schools and health care were stretched to the brink, housing got more expensive and harder to find, and there were steady complaints about driving safety.

And then on the first day of school last year, 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed when his school bus flipped over. A driver in the opposing lane caused the accident by crossing the centre line; the driver was Haitian and driving without a licence.

The tragedy struck a match on the simmering tensions. Rumours bloomed, the way they do when frustrated people talk amongst themselves. The most salacious involved a missing cat who turned out not to be missing, and suspicions about geese in local parks.

Meanwhile, city leadership had written to state and federal officials asking for funding and raising concerns about the effect of border policies on cities such as Springfield.

Mr. Vance, then the Republican vice-presidential candidate, shoved these two things together in a tweet, and the next day on the debate stage, Mr. Trump proclaimed, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats.”

In an instant, the city was transformed from a real place full of real people – with real problems, though not of the pet-eating kind – into cannon fodder. The Trump-Vance lies focused all the free-floating political vitriol in the air and blasted it at Springfield, like sunlight passed through a magnifying glass.

Dozens of bomb threats shut down schools, businesses and city buildings. The world’s media descended, and so did white supremacists. City officials got death threats, the mayor declared a state of emergency and the governor sent in state troopers.

Springfield’s city website now includes a special Immigration FAQs page. Among the questions are, “Why don’t the immigrants work?” “Is there an entire wing of the hospital dedicated to Haitian women with HIV/AIDs?” and “Are Haitians being released after arrest because of the language barrier?”

The answers are patient and precise, but if it is possible for a government website to sound exhausted, this one does.

Larry Ricketts was on vacation in Yellowstone National Park with his wife recently, and when people heard he was from Springfield, they instantly asked about the pet-eating thing.

Driving from one end of Springfield to the other the day before the election, he quipped, “The biggest threat to cats and dogs here are the F-150s, Dodge Rams and Chevy Silverados.”

The city’s downtown is tiny but idyllic in that way only American cities of a certain size are. There are some crumbling and empty buildings, but everywhere are signs of a city hauling itself back to its feet, too: new restaurants and stores, two coffee shops and a bakery all as charming as a movie set, and a historic market building that houses a food hall and co-working space.

The old State Theater has opened back up as a bar, movie and live music venue, its marquee a nostalgic night light glowing over downtown. On election night, they’d be showing a democracy double feature: Napoleon Dynamite and The Manchurian Candidate.

Huge, bright murals tell the story of the city’s past, and lampposts and store windows are plastered with posters for an astonishing array of cultural events. MustardFest – a tribute to the city’s past German immigration and the local mustard manufacturer Woeber’s – includes wildly popular wiener dog races, but after the political lunacy earlier this fall, the quirky logo of a Dachshund in a hot dog bun required a hasty redesign.

If you follow Fountain Avenue north from downtown, you pass block after block of bucolic Christmas-card streets: deep lawns and big, stately old houses, each one different, all well-kept. This is where Mr. Ricketts and his wife settled when they retired to their hometown nearly a decade ago, after 25 years living in California.

“There’s some real positive things that happen here in town,” he said. “And this has really given us a black eye.”

A brick and stucco house on a prominent corner had a sign on its lawn featuring a cat swatting a tiny red elephant off a ledge, with text above reading, “Nov. 5, 2024.” On the opposite side of the street, two large houses next to each other both featured Trump-Vance 2024 signs the size of billboards.

At the south end of Fountain Avenue, the houses are still big, but the lawns get shallower and many of the homes sag with neglect. This part of Springfield has long been home to less wealth and the city’s Black population, and now it’s also where a large proportion of the Haitians live.

City council meetings happen every two weeks, and there’s an open-mic segment where members of the public get three minutes to raise anything they want. They have to submit to a metal detector and bag search before entering the building now, and people must present ID to prove they live in Clark County, because the meetings became a furious outsider circus after the debate.

On Monday evening, Jacob Payen of the Haitian Community Alliance was there in a three-piece suit.

“Last time I was here, Mister Mayor, I was devastated, because there was a lot of complaints about Haitian immigrants,” Mr. Payen said in his allotted three minutes. “But tonight, Mister Mayor, I have good news. We have heard all the complaints. We are taking actions.”

They were developing a driving program and offering road safety tips on Haitian radio stations, he reported, and they’d set up a Creole hotline to help overcome language barriers with government agencies and police.

Mr. Payen was midway through his explanation of a magazine that would “help the residents to understand our culture, understand us as a people” when his time ran out.

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On Tuesday morning, by the time the voting precinct at the non-denominational Central Christian Church opened, the line stretched to the back of the parking lot. Pastor Carl Ruby and his “cinnamon bun crew” toiled in the kitchen, baking up 360 giant pastries and ladling small lakes of icing onto them as a fundraiser.

Mr. Ruby has been one of the most outspoken advocates in town for the Haitian community. The week before the election, he had sounded exhausted and deeply rattled by the intensity of it all, even though the hundreds of messages his church received had mostly been supportive.

“Almost 99 per cent were over-the-top positive. That shocked me, because I thought, ‘Oh boy, we’re gonna get all kinds of nasty voice messages left and e-mails and letters,’ ” he said. “And there’s been a shocking absence of that.”

People all over the city described a gradual turning down of the temperature lately, and by election day, Mr. Ruby seemed more at peace as he hustled in and out of the cinnamon-scented kitchen.

Half a dozen voters at this precinct that leans white and well-off expressed distaste over the lies that had been told about their city; all said they had voted for Mr. Trump.

Jennifer McFaddin said she had twice nearly been run off the road with her two kids in the car, and everything was getting too expensive, which she attributed to both inflation and demand from the newcomers in town. She disliked the more outlandish claims about Haitians, because there was no proof of it.

“I don’t like living where it’s the centre of attention,” she said. Ms. McFaddin had voted Republican.

“I’m just trying to go for who I feel is more for us in general,” she said.

Springfield has an appointed city manager who runs day-to-day operations, alongside an elected mayor and city commissioners. As mayor, Rob Rue gets paid $15,000 a year, and his day job is owner of Littleton & Rue Funeral Home, which was his dad’s before him.

The tasteful, cloistered stillness of the funeral home was bizarrely at odds with the crescendo of this seething election campaign, and also a calming weighted blanket for the soul because of it. Mr. Rue sat with an iced coffee from Winans, a local Ohio chain, in a softly lit room, the shelves to his left displaying urns and memorial jewellery.

He kept using the word “season” to describe the last few months, like a weather system had blown through. He laid out the escalating uproar – bomb threats emptying out buildings, a hate group showing up outside his house, his children named in threats – as though he was puzzling out his own reaction.

“Probably my personality doesn’t understand the depth of some things, which may protect me a little bit,” he said. “Maybe it’s just occupational because I’m around people’s trauma all the time – I mean, I didn’t like what it was doing to my family.”

Mr. Rue, a Republican, said there has been a clear economic upswing in the city, 2,000 new houses are in the works and developers have shown interest in building high-end properties. But the furor has scared others away.

“I’m okay to get the spotlight off of us,” he said.

In contrast to the funeral home’s hush, late in the afternoon on election day, Rose Goute Creole Restaurant was boisterous with music, its front windows plastered with images of the rice and beans, fried plantains and grilled meats served in enormous portions inside.

Vilès Dorsainvil sat at a table near the door, periodically interrupting himself to say hello to the people who greeted him on their way to the takeout counter. He moved to Springfield four years ago; he left Haiti because his family worried he’d be a kidnapping target since he’d lived in Jamaica and people who have lived abroad are seen as rich.

While he tries to keep things “apolitical” because of his work as executive director of the Haitian Community Help & Support Center, he acknowledged that he worries about what Mr. Trump’s vows of mass deportation will mean, or whether people will be more emboldened to yell obscenities out their car windows.

He wonders now if he was “naive” to think that leaders like Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance would apologize once they realized they’d made a mistake in what they said about Springfield’s Haitians.

“I wouldn’t see it as a weakness,” Mr. Dorsainvil says.

Several hundred thousand dollars in donations have poured into his organization from people who wanted to offset the ugliness of the last few months. The centre just announced they bought a former Springfield fire station, where they plan to hold English and driving classes.

“Whether it is Republican or Democrat, I am more concerned about our foreign policy toward Haiti. Because I said to myself, I wouldn’t have to answer this question if my country was okay,” Mr. Dorsainvil said. “I would be home.”

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The day after the election, Clark County results showed that 64 per cent of Springfielders and their neighbours had supported Mr. Trump, an uptick of three points from 2020.

To Kevin Rose, a historian with the Turner Foundation – a family philanthropic organization devoted to the revitalization of the city – Springfield is accustomed to a strange spotlight because it has so often been treated not as a small city but as the small city.

Whenever someone goes looking for a typical American town to profile, Springfield is often where they focus, he says, because Ohio seems culturally and geographically neutral, and Springfield’s size and postindustrial identity works as an avatar of Americana.

When Newsweek marked its 50th anniversary in 1982 with a lavish, novel-length project on one city, Springfield was the star. Over and over, Mr. Rose says, the city has been held aloft in journalism, surveys and studies as a city-sized skeleton key to unlock some fundamental understanding of American life.

“It’s the quintessential American city, right? And I don’t mean that in a good version of quintessential, I mean that in a real version – it’s the real America, right?” Mr. Rose says. “What anyone loves or hates about America is Springfield.”

Downtown, one of the most appealing destinations is Champion City Guide & Supply, which acts as both a visitor centre and purveyor of all manner of products featuring Springfield inside jokes.

There are posters done up like 1970s horror movies paying homage to “The curse of the Ferncliff fence,” a section of cemetery fencing that keeps getting rammed by cars that skid out on a curve in the road. There are hoodies bearing the logo of Wren’s, a long-gone department store, and prints of old seed catalogues from the 1920s, when Springfield was the Rose City that shipped beautiful fragility all over the country.

Then there are the items featuring a slogan from 1932, when the Great Depression was deepest and morale in Springfield was bleak, so the city held a rally centred on a bracing motto.

Several of these shirts and mugs perch in the front windows looking out onto the city where a scorching political spotlight was trained not so long ago, but where, on the day after the election, Springfield belonged to itself once again.

“Speak a good word for Springfield,” the slogan goes. “Or say nothing.”

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