Protesters stood in the rain, waiting to greet the daughter of a drapery salesman and the son of an iron welder as they rolled into western Pennsylvania and Ohio.  Related: Trump has 'black soul', says Khizr Khan, father of fallen Muslim US soldier  Coal Country, a region where Donald Trump expects to win over blue-collar workers and cultural conservatives, isn’t friendly territory for Democrats. That was precisely why Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine had come.  “Lock her up!” a few dozen protesters jeered as they stepped off the bus into a rainy haze on their fourth stop of their post-convention tour, at Johnstown Wire Technologies factory in Cambria county, which is 93% white and has a median household income of $42,000. Some waved Trump 2016 signs and American flags. Others held homemade posters with phrases like: “Send her a$$ to jail!” Across the road a smaller group huddled. Their signs read: “Steelworkers for Clinton.”  With 100 days to go to the presidential election, Clinton and Kaine have made clear they are going to fight for working-class voters. On their first campaign trip together, the two Ivy League-educated political insiders drew on their modest midwestern upbringings in an effort to connect with voters now frustrated with their lot.  We have the most productive, competitive workers in the world, we just need to give our people the chance to succeed  There, Clinton recalled in detail how she would spend hours in her father’s dimly lit printing plant, dragging a squeegee across the silk screen laid on top of the drapery fabric. In the factory, Kaine said he recognized some of the machinery from the days spent in his father’s iron-working shop.  “We are visiting places that prove what Americans can do,” Clinton told 200 or so mostly unionized workers during her remarks at the factory. “We have the most productive, competitive workers in the world, we just need to give our people the chance to succeed. So from Philadelphia to Hatfield to Harrisburg and now here in Johnstown, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”  For decades, Democrats have lost out to Republicans among blue-collar workers and white Americans with a low education. Trump has capitalized on this trend and is counting on making a battleground state out of Pennsylvania, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 1988. The state is central to Trump’s Rust Belt strategy, along with success in the Great Lakes states such as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.  Polls show a tight race there. In a head-to-head race, Clinton leads Trump in Pennsylvania by 46% to 42%, according to the realclearpolitics.com average. In Ohio, she leads by less than 1%, 42.6% to 41.8%.  Under gauzy marquee lighting at a market in Harrisburg, Clinton appealed for help convincing ambivalent voters that the stakes are now too high to sit out.  “If somebody is not interested in voting,” she said, “if somebody has given up on politics, if somebody says it won’t make any difference, ask them to give us a chance.”  Through the weekend, the Clinton-Kaine motorcade wound through faded factory towns in hilly green landscapes.  “If you’re looking for a kind of pessimistic, downbeat vision of America, we’re not your folks,” Clinton said at toy manufacturing factory in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, on Friday. “We do not buy into that dark, divisive image that was presented at the Republican convention last week.”  In her first 100 days in office, Clinton said, she would push through a gridlocked Congress the biggest jobs agenda since the second world war, a plan to create more jobs by investing in new infrastructure and clean energy.  “We’re going to create jobs in Pennsylvania and across America,” she said in Johnstown. “Especially in places that have been left out and left behind.”  Related: Clinton blames Russia for DNC hack as Trump seems to back annex of Crimea  While Clinton tried to keep the focus of the tour on her economic agenda, she was once again forced to respond to a controversy generated by Trump. In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Trump insulted the family of Humayun Khan, a 27-year-old Muslim US army captain who died in a suicide bombing in Iraq in 2004.  At a cheese shop in Ashland, Ohio, Clinton told reporters: “He has throughout the course of his campaign consistently insulted and demeaned individuals, groups of Americans, people around the world and one doesn’t know where the bottom is. It’s hard to imagine anyone who has ever run to be president of the United States saying any of what he said. The accumulation of it all is just beyond my comprehension.”  Amid widespread criticism on Saturday, Trump released a statement which addressed the speech given by Khan’s father at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last week. “While I feel deeply for the loss of his son,” Trump said, “Mr Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things.”  On Sunday, however, Trump relapsed, using Twitter to say: “I was viciously attacked by Mr Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!”  On her bus tour, Clinton earned her second major endorsement from an ideologically independent billionaire when Mark Cuban hailed her as a “true leader” at a rally in his native Pittsburgh.  “In Hillary Clinton’s America, the American Dream is alive and well,” Cuban said, electrifying the crowd.  Earlier in the week, Michael Bloomberg offered a sharp rebuke of Trump at the Democratic convention. Such support could help Clinton and Kaine appeal to disillusioned Republicans like Malynda Lee, who runs a small tech business in Pittsburgh.  “Normally I’m a conservative but as a woman I feel compelled to vote for Clinton,” Lee said, noting some of the derogatory comments Trump has made about women. She added that she hoped successful businessmen like Cuban and Bloomberg backing Clinton would undermine Trump’s reliance on his own business record while keeping pressure on the Democrats to support small business owners and entrepreneurs.  “[Trump’s] not a good businessman,” Lee said. “That’s just wrong. What he is, he’s a bully.”  Trump seized on Clinton’s visit to Johnstown, saying it was akin to a “robber visiting their victim” and blaming the loss of manufacturing jobs in such towns on international trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he has railed against. Clinton has said she does not support the TPP, but Trump has cast doubt on the sincerity of her opposition.  “A vote for Hillary is a vote to destroy American manufacturing,” said Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to the Trump campaign, “and to surrender to the global special interests bankrolling Hillary’s life.”  You don't encourage a foreign nation to commit espionage on our national security. That was it for me … the last straw  On the defensive after the Democratic convention, Trump announced that he would visit Columbus and Harrisburg, tracking some of the stops Clinton made on her tour.  Youngstown, Ohio, is another place that has suffered terribly since its industrial heyday. At a rally there that kicked off about 10.15pm on Saturday, two hours late, Sean Cornelius said he had waited for seven hours to see the woman he only decided to support last week.  “You don’t encourage a foreign nation to commit espionage on our national security,” said Cornelius, who described himself as a moderate conservative, referring to Trump’s call on Wednesday for Russia to find “30,000 missing emails” from the private server Clinton used while secretary of state.  “That was it for me,” Cornelius said. “That was the last straw.”  Cornelius said his vote for Clinton would not be cast entirely in protest. He was impressed by her jobs agenda, he said. And while he said he did not fully trust Clinton – a perception the candidate herself has admitted is a challenge – he said he trusted her more than Trump, and that was enough.  “A lot of my Republican friends are the same,” Cornelius said. “We’re crossing the line because we just can’t believe the stuff he’s saying.”  Trump is betting that the battle for America’s working class will decide the election. In Johnstown, though, a man stood apart from the huddle of protesters. He was drenched by the rain but he managed a thin smile as the buses arrived. He held above his head a red poster featuring the most memorable line of Bill Clinton’s 1992 acceptance speech: “I still believe in a place called Hope.”
As the Democrats touted job policies among blue-collar workers courted by Republicans, the GOP nominee’s latest controversy exploded, stage right