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Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Maps by Shannon M. Venditti. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
With a smile, a tear, and an abundance of love, this book is dedicated to my children, Shannon and Glenn, who fill my days with all three; to my parents, Joan and Ron, whose guidance surrounded me with love, family, and tradition; to my sisters and brother whose dedication to family and community inspire me; to my virtuous son-in-law, Michael; and to my granddaughter, Eleanora.
For dad, Ron Todd, my first editor, who hauled me around when I got my first writing job at age fourteen and could not drive myself. And for Elizabeth, who has the patience to endure the first oral draft of everything, long before its worth hearing.
Authors Note
The best analysis marries smart empirical research with on-the-scene, shoe-leather reporting. Thats the premise behind the collaboration that brought this book to life.
We first met more than a decade agoa reporter covering national politics from Pittsburgh, far outside the Beltway, and a political strategist whose roots were at the other end of the Appalachian mountain chain in Tennessee. Populism is not just a subject to study for us; its a worldview we understand genetically. When a populist wave swept an unconventional candidate into office in 2016, we gravitated to each other to combine our expertise and analyze the unique moment in American political history.
Like most professionals in our respective businessesjournalism and Republican campaign strategywe did not predict Trumps rise from the start. One of us, Brad Todd, even predicted his coming demise, wrongly, multiple times in the course of the Republican nomination fight. But in the general election campaign, we each had front-row seats to the tidal wave as it formed far out in the political ocean.
Salena Zito lived on the road, reporting for the New York Post and the Washington Examiner, while contributing pieces to publications such as The Atlantic. For a long article in the Post, Zito traveled the length of the old Lincoln Highway, highlighting the record surge of support for Trump far off the beaten path. In his role as a strategist and ad-maker advising Republican campaigns and conservative groups including the National Rifle Association, Todd watched focus groups of undecided voters, especially in the Midwest, process their hesitations about Trump and their overriding anxiety about globalism and traditional politics.
These experiences witnessing real, and largely forgotten, people process the choices in this election led to the conclusion that this election might be more than a single event and perhaps a whitecap in an ongoing tide. It is our hope that the combination of our expertise not only brings a unique method to telling the story of one election but also introduces the faces of a movement that may well go beyond it.
Converting the Rust Belt: Trumps Growth over Romneys 2016 Performance
The darker the county, the larger the delta between Donald Trumps 2016 net margin versus Hillary Clinton relative to Mitt Romneys 2012 net margin versus Barack Obama. The lighter the county, the larger the delta between Romneys 2012 net margin and Trumps 2016 net margin.
1
Hidden in Plain Sight
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.