Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, center, brings boxes of pizzas Wednesday to striking United Auto Workers members in front of the idled General Motors plant in Lordstown. He talked to Steve Gay of Howland, left, during his visit. Staff photo / R. Michael Semple

LORDSTOWN — After spending time on the picket line in front of the idled General Motors complex, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said the striking United Auto Workers are not just fighting for themselves, but for the future of America.

“Without unions, these UAW members willing to strike, without the concessions that they must win, there’s a real chance we lose the middle class in a country that is already economically divided as it’s ever been,” O’Rourke said. “The wealth inequality in America is unprecedented at least in our lifetime. You’d have to go back to the last gilded age in this country to see anything close to that — so they’re really fighting for us.”

O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, spent more than two hours Wednesday in Lords-town — first at a labor roundtable with a dozen people and then a visit to the main gate at the idled GM plant where about 30 people greeted him. O’Rourke carried five boxes of pizza to the picket line while a campaign worker carried another seven.

It was part of a two-day swing through Ohio for O’Rourke, who is struggling in the polls, that began Tuesday with stops at a UAW picket line in West Chester, and meeting voters in Dayton and Columbus. On Wednesday, he was in Lords-town and Kent (and started his day in Pittsburgh).

O’Rourke said he came away from his time in Lordstown hearing from people who told him “they feel forgotten. They’re reliving a nightmare that they saw their parents live with the closure of steel” mills. “It’s happening again with the closure of GM. My message to them is: They’re so important not just to me, not just to Ohio, but to the future of our country.”

GM put the Lordstown plant on unallocated status in March after the facility operated for 53 years. At one point, the plant employed about 15,000 people, but had about 1,500 when it was idled.

O’Rourke sharply criticized GM for making an $8 billion profit last year and not bargaining with UAW in good faith.

Wednesday marked the 10th day of the UAW strike, the union’s longest since 1985 when it went on strike for 12 days against Chrysler.

In contract talks, GM has offered to build an electric vehicle battery plant at the Lords-town facility to be staffed by far fewer union workers who would be paid less than the $30 per hour UAW members make on assembly lines, according to the Associated Press.

A number of people on the picket line and at the labor roundtable at Lordstown High School told O’Rourke their families have been split with GM workers relocating while their spouses and children remain in the Mahoning Valley.

Jeremy Ladd said at the roundtable that he had to take a job in Indiana — a four-hour drive — while his wife and two 8-year-old daughters remain here.

Raneal Edwards recently transferred to a Michigan plant, also a four-hour drive, leaving behind her son.

“We had to make a choice,” she said. “They were forcing a lot of our members (to relocate). I decided to take control of my destiny.”

Frank Sarna, who was laid off from Lordstown in July 2018, talked to O’Rourke on the picket line.

“We made a lot of money for GM and this is how they reward us,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face. We’re going to have to do what we’ve got to do.”

Sarna said of O’Rourke, “I applaud him for coming out. He seemed genuine to me and concerned.”

O’Rourke is polling at 2.6 percent nationally among Democratic presidential candidates, according to RealClearPolitics.com. That puts him in seventh place.

When asked about a transcript, provided Wednesday by the White House, of a July 25 phone call in which President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son, O’Rourke said there is no doubt that Trump should be impeached.

“If there had been any doubt for any member of Congress, any American, any member of the press about the president’s complicity and culpability and very high crimes and misdemeanors then this transcript, these call notes, should erase any and all doubt,” O’Rourke said.

dskolnick@tribtoday.com