These are voters in a very volatile economic region. I would guess Ohioans from many different walks of life where feeling kicked around and down and desperate for a change last year. That's not to say anything negative about them, it's just the facts of their region in the US at the time. I don't doubt their sincerity, I'm saying Trump took advantage of it for his support.
As a lifelong Ohioan, I can say much of what you're saying is spot-on.
...but just as much as many Ohioans were facing economic uncertainty, they were also being blasted 24/7 with misleading ad campaigns about every issue under the sun that was influencing their decision making quite a bit leading up to the elections.
I typically have a hard time finding a way to say this that doesn't come off as harsh, so I'll just say it straight up. Ohio has a lot of people who aren't very educated on politics and statistics. ...and that's not saying they're stupid, that's just saying they're desperately lacking in those areas. Part of that can be blamed on the education system...
...but part of that can also be blamed on the fact that churches (in Northeast and Central Ohio in particular) have oodles of funding and resources and have no qualms throwing money certain political endeavors (but in an indirect way so that they don't violate any rules of 501(c)(3). My parents' church (the one I was forced to go to), has a facility that had a price tag of $1.8 million to build, and it's not even in the top 3 in the area in terms of size or fanciness, and just their church alone spent 5-figures on local efforts (sending people door to door, buying some local advertising, sending out mailers, etc...) to indirectly sway people against voting for the democrats (without coming out and directly saying it which would violate some rules). In in very rural areas of the state, for example Wooster Ohio (which is about 45 minutes away from where I live...and that's about as much personal info as I'm going to reveal about myself) is in rural farm country (very small city center, and the rest is farms, very few developments), yet, here's what their 3 largest churches look like.
We're talking about a city of roughly 20,000 people total (spread over a large, mostly rural, area), with a median household income of ~$41k.
In order to build and keep up those 3 facilities, you need to be pretty persuasive and have a lot of influence in order to convince those residents to part with a fairly large percentage of their income. These ornate facilities are evidence of how much pull religion has in this part of the country, and just based on my own observation, they really cranked up the influence this last election cycle as opposed to the previous one. They didn't really do much during the previous two elections (which is likely why Obama carried Ohio both times), but they turned it up to 11 when they were looking to thwart Hillary.
