Biden has presided over a factory boom. But in an Ohio town where two are being built, he doesn’t get much credit. - The Boston Globe

JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — Dawn had yet to crack the summer sky when 66-year-old Larry Evans settled into his regular seat by the front door of the Dashing Diner Uptown and began his day with a sip of coffee. His arrival just after 6 a.m. most mornings is a simple constant during a time of dramatic change in this small rural community northeast of Columbus.

Soon, as reliable as the rising sun in recent months, the tractor trailers and construction trucks will come rumbling through town. They’re a loud and dusty symbol of a factory building boom taking place under President Biden that is creating tens of thousands of jobs nationwide — but so far, at least here, little political benefit for him.

Intel is turning nearly 1,000 acres of nearby farmland into what it calls a manufacturing mega-site that could house as many as eight state-of-the art computer chip factories. The first phase involves two factories that will cost more than $20 billion and require 7,000 construction workers to build. When those open in 2025, Intel says the facilities will have 3,000 full-time employees and spur the creation of thousands of other jobs for suppliers and services.

Construction underway at the Intel site near Johnstown, Ohio, on Thursday.Maddie McGarvey for the Boston Globe

“I look at it as jobs and a benefit to the community,” said Evans, who is semi-retired and has lived in Johnstown for about four decades. “The negative side of it is this little town probably won’t be a little town anymore.”

The surge in new factory construction since Biden took office is partly fueled by new federal laws he championed, including the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act that provides $280 billion over a decade to boost the US computer chip industry. Intel announced its initial plans for the factories in early 2022 before Congress approved that legislation. But the company’s chief executive, Pat Gelsinger, has said the law will make the project “bigger and faster,” and Intel held off on breaking ground until it passed last summer.

The creation of what’s been dubbed Silicon Heartland promises to super-charge the regional and state economies while helping the United States avoid a repeat of the shortages of foreign-made computer chips during the pandemic that curtailed auto manufacturing and dozens of other industries. Biden points to the strong growth in construction and manufacturing as proof his economic policies are working, noting that some analyses have shown that the new laws he’s pushed “are going to do more to help red America than blue America.”

But in this particular sliver of red America — where Donald Trump overwhelmingly won in both his presidential runs — residents aren’t giving Biden much credit for the new Intel factories and the jobs coming with them. The reaction demonstrates the difficulty the president faces to lift his low approval rating heading into the 2024 election, even in places where his Made in America push is paying direct dividends.

“I never thought about giving him the credit,” said David Davis, 34, a property manager at a local horse farm who joined Evans for breakfast one recent morning. “I’m not a fan of Biden.”

Evans, who makes deliveries for AutoZone after a long career at a printing and engraving company, said that while Biden might deserve some credit for the Intel project, it’s not enough to make up for other shortcomings. Both men, who voted for Trump in 2020, believe Biden has done a bad job overall on the economy.

“We’ve seen fuel prices and food costs skyrocket under this administration,” Evans said before ordering a sausage and cheese omelet with buttered Texas toast. “I don’t know if he’s solely to blame for that, but it seems to be that way.”

Biden didn’t help his cause in Johnstown when he said in his 2022 State of the Union address that the Intel project was a “field of dreams” being built on “a thousand empty acres of land.”

“The people around here felt that was a kick in the face because this is their livelihood. These fields were being used to grow crops … and a lot of homes got taken down,” said Johnstown Mayor Donny Barnard, who describes himself as a centrist Republican who is “anti-Trump.” “It kind of hurts you, especially if that’s where you grew up.”

Johnstown Mayor Donny Barnard in downtown Johnstown, Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for the Boston Globe

Biden’s inadvertent verbal slight, of course, isn’t the foundation of this area’s dislike of him. But it further hardened already calcified views that are proving difficult to change here and across the country for politicians on either side of the divide. Biden is hoping the arrival of new factories will soften the partisanship, and his campaign recently launched a TV ad in battleground states that boasts, “Manufacturing jobs are coming home. High speed computer chips are getting made right here.”

Barnard, who took office last November, thinks Biden “probably” is responsible for getting the CHIPS Act passed, but not for the Intel project, which he said came after a lot of wooing of the technology giant by state and local officials.

Still, residents in Republican Johnstown aren’t inclined to credit Biden for much of anything, Barnard said.

“Biden can lay a golden egg right here,” he said, “and people would still find fault.”

The resurgence of US manufacturing has been a golden egg for the post-pandemic economy.

The nation has added about 789,000 factory jobs since Biden took office, bringing total manufacturing employment to its highest level since 2008. And more of those jobs are in the pipeline. Construction spending on factories has been surging recently after the passage of major federal legislation. Along with the CHIPS Act, Biden successfully pushed into law the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping fuel green energy investments.

White House officials say it takes time for Americans to feel the impact of those laws because many projects are just getting started. With inflation declining and optimism rising that the nation can hold off a feared recession, Biden’s approval rating on the economy ticked up slightly over the past two months to 36 percent in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on Aug. 17. But that’s still extremely low and below his poor overall 42 percent approval rating in the poll.

To try to change those views, Biden and top administration officials have been traveling the country in recent weeks commemorating the one-year anniversaries of the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act by highlighting their economic impact. The White House said companies have announced more than $166 billion in computer chip and electronics projects since the CHIPS Act was signed.

“I think we just have to make it real and tell the story because historic legislation is fantastic, but it’s conceptual,” said Jeff Zients, Biden’s White House chief of staff. “This is changing people’s lives and that’s why we need to be on the ground and be comfortable being repetitive about how this is making people’s lives better.”

The Intel project will make lives better across the Columbus area and the entire state, said Kenny McDonald, president and chief executive of the Columbus Partnership, an organization of regional chief executives that helped Ohio win an intense nationwide competition for the factories. Biden “absolutely” deserves some of the credit, McDonald said.

“The CHIPS Act was very integral from the very beginning of the project,” he said. “He’s the president and the administration drove these policies and they did the necessary work to build bipartisan relationships to get this done.”

The bipartisanship was evident at the groundbreaking ceremony last September, which featured a gospel choir and the Ohio State University marching band. President Biden spoke, as did fellow Democrats Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Representative Joyce Beatty of Columbus, along with two prominent state Republicans, Governor Mike DeWine and then-Senator Rob Portman. Brown faces a tough reelection race next year in a state Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2020 and 2016.

“The United States has to lead the world in producing these advanced chips, and this law makes sure that we will,” Biden told the crowd, referencing the CHIPS Act. And though he ditched his State of the Union description of the Intel site as “empty land,” Tiffany Hollis, 46, owner of the Dashing Diner Uptown, still remembers that comment.

“I don’t know that there’s anything he can do to recover from that,” she said one recent morning, taking a break after working the grill.

Customers ate at the Dashing Diner Uptown in Johnstown, Ohio, on Thursday.Maddie McGarvey for the Boston Globe

Like many people in this community of about 5,250, Hollis has mixed feelings about a project that she said has felt like a “huge unknown tsunami wave.” Although the factories are technically in neighboring New Albany, a larger Columbus suburb, the land was annexed from Johnstown and it is bearing the brunt of the upheaval from the biggest economic development project in Ohio history.

The manufacturing boom has its upsides, but the downsides increase the closer you get to the factories. Hollis’s grandmother, uncle, and brother all had homes on the site, she said. Intel bought them and bulldozed them.

“Originally, all I felt was loss, complete loss,” Hollis said.

Johnstown and surrounding rural towns in Licking County have plenty of farmland that can be purchased to build new industrial parks for Intel suppliers and housing for factory workers. Real estate prices already have shot up, and residents worry about the schools getting overwhelmed and their children being unable to afford to live here when they grow up.

But there have been some positives already. Business at the Dashing Diner Uptown has picked up as the project advances. And as Hollis has gotten to know some of the construction and Intel workers coming in, her perspective has evolved.

“I don’t even want to like them, but I really do,” she said.

With all the change, Hollis helped re-launch Johnstown’s long dormant Chamber of Commerce last year so business owners could have a stronger voice in how the community will transform. In that capacity, she was invited to the groundbreaking, where she found inspiration from a speech by Frederic Bertley, president of the Center of Science and Industry museum and research center in Columbus. He compared the innovation that will come from the Intel project to the advances spurred by the space race in the 1960s.

“It changed everything from feeling so much loss to feeling pride,” Hollis said of her view of the new factories and the need to make computer chips in the United States. “Does anybody really want that happening in their backyard? Not really. But there are benefits that come with it.”

A truck drove down Main Street in Johnstown, Ohio, on Thursday.Maddie McGarvey for the Boston Globe

The trucks had started rolling down South Main Street outside the diner’s window as Hollis talked, headed to and from the sprawling site. Along its borders, workers in neon yellow vests were widening two-lane country roads into four-lane thoroughfares. Bright orange “Road Work Ahead” signs sprouted like sunflowers amid the corn and soybean fields around Johnstown.

Hollis said she knows that there’s more pain to come as the construction accelerates but “that’s the price of progress.” Still, she doesn’t connect that progress to Biden. As a business owner, she did not want to say how she voted in 2020 but acknowledged that Johnstown is “predominantly conservative.” And even when the dust is gone and the factories are up and running, producing jobs along with computer chips, Hollis doesn’t think it will do much for Biden here.

“I think there might be a little bit of credit given,” she said, “but overall I would say probably not.”

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.