Salena Zito - The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics

Converting the Rust Belt: Trumps Growth over Romneys 2016 Performance

Jefferson, Ashtabula County, Ohio It is 1:45 in the morning and Bonnie Smiths alarm has just gone off. That alarm is a reminder that, seven days a week, she is living her lifelong dream of owning a bakery.

I come in at two-thirty in the morning. We start making doughnuts from scratch. After that, I go into the breads and pies or whatever I have going outlike right now I need to do cupcakes, and I have a couple pies I have to put out, but I also have to check what orders are going out. Then we start soups, and by eleven oclock we start lunch, she explains.

At sixty-three, she is two years into her second career in the small town of Jefferson, running a Chestnut Street bakery that is a throwback to simpler times: pretty pink-and-green wallpaper decorated with cupcakes surrounds a fireplace and tables and chairs that fill the front of the bakery.

By 9:00 a.m., already half of her sugar cookies, tea cakes, cream wafers, brownies, mini tarts, and thumbprints are gone. With the help of her grandson, a fresh batch of sugary glazed doughnuts makes its way from the kitchen to a tray in the display case.

The aroma is irresistible and intoxicating and gently teases the senses.

A young mother enters with her three-year-old daughter, Evelyn, who immediately makes a beeline to the display case filled with colorful cookies and pastries and, with the willfulness and determination only a toddler possesses, plants her face against the case to get a closer look at the cupcake with rainbow sprinkles on top.

To the girls delight, Smith hands her the confection, and minutes later Evelyns face and fingers are covered in pink icing. The imprint of her little face on the display casea smudged outline of a tiny nose and lipsmakes Smith smile broadly.

As Smith started making soup for the anticipated lunch crowd, the diminutive brunette was sporting a white apron with LEGALLY SWEET embroidered across the front, the name of her shop and a hat tip to her thirty-plus years at the Ashtabula County Sheriffs Office.

She started working as a cook in the sheriffs department when the youngest of her three children was five years old. It was the same job her mother had.

But Smith wanted more.

So she went back to school for criminal law while she worked as a cook in the courthouse. She then moved over to dispatch and up through the ranks in the sheriffs department until she made deputy, all the while raising her three children with her husband, an electrician for Millennium Inorganic Chemicalsone of the last big blue-collar employers in the once-mighty manufacturing county of Ashtabula, wedged between the shore of Lake Erie and the Pennsylvania state line, northeast of Cleveland.

Smith was raised a Democrat, her parents were Democrats, she is married to a Democrat, and she worked for elected Democratic sheriffs in a county that had not voted a Republican into local office for as long as anyone you find can remember.

Until 2016, that is, when Ashtabula picked Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and swept in a local ticket of Republicans underneath him.