Salena Zito Quotes

As coverage of Trump has become more hyperbolic and more antagonistic, it only stands to reason that voters—even mild-mannered Methodist matrons like Tedrow—could pass lasting judgment on the news networks, just as they checked out on the Republican Party establishment and then Hillary Clinton. If the Trump coalition broke two large institutions in American life, it’s not a stretch to imagine it breaking another.

The motivation for the nationalism of today’s populists is a lot closer to the so-called locavore impulse of the shoppers at Whole Foods, the upscale chain of organic grocery stores, than to the dictators of the Second and Third Worlds.

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

Those 173 sizable counties are home to 54 percent of the U.S. population, and in 135 of them Trump even lagged behind the net margin performance of losing 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Trump crawled out of that mathematical hole in the all-but-forgotten communities—thousands of them. It took a lot of Bonnie Smiths, in a lot of places like Ashtabula County, to wreck political expectations—and if their political behavior in 2016 becomes an affiliation and not a dalliance, they have the potential to realign the American political construct and perhaps the country’s commercial and cultural presumptions as well.

ABC News calculated that Clinton made just seven visits to Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan combined, while Trump came to those three states eighteen times—becoming the first Republican to carry all three of the Midwestern battlegrounds in the same election since 1984.

This is prime real estate—once the home of orchards filled with apples, cornfields, and berry farms, it is now home to successful suburbanites, nearly all with blue-collar roots, who made it out of the city in the 1970s on more than just sheer willpower; they worked two jobs, they worked overtime, they took out loans; in short, they did everything they legally could to move out and up. Macomb

The Great Revolt Survey found that the one demographic group among Rust Belt Trump voters most likely to agree with the notion that “every American has a fundamental right to self-defense and a right to choose the home defense firearm that is best for them” is women under age forty-five.

In Pennsylvania, a key state that Trump flipped from Obama’s column, there are now more than a million permit holders, and in some counties more than one-third of the adult population is licensed to carry.5

The saliency of the issue of self-defense among women in that younger demographic was critical, because they were exactly the group most likely to bail on Trump in the wake of the revelation in October 2016 of the lewd comments he had made to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.

So, I work at a defense contractor. We deal with classified information. Everyone understands how to handle information at that company. There are five hundred people that work there and that’s one site; there’s multiple sites. There’s no way that in her position she didn’t know what she was doing with the information. I mean, I have to tell you the amount of checks and security that we go through…And it’s insulting for people who understand that for her to sit there and lie,” she says.

Borglin says the news can be so biased that it provides a slanted filter instead of delivering just straight news. “My kids are very susceptible to that,” she says, explaining that they don’t understand they are only seeing one point of view instead of the whole story. “Even though I think my kids are intelligent enough, it’s what’s coming at them all the time. And a lot of what portrayed itself as news, isn’t really news, it was propaganda. And they saw it as, sometimes there was truth, but a lot of times there wasn’t. And then all of the things you taught them start coming apart,” she says.

The individual voters featured in this book come from ten counties that switched allegiances from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016, in the five pivotal Great Lakes or Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Those counties were chosen to ensure as much variety among the population tiers listed above as is possible.

Even voices in the proud New York Times newsroom now cede that Facebook, not the Old Gray Lady itself, now drives the national conversation with the horsepower of its search traffic and algorithms providing traditional media its best chance to be seen. “Measured by web traffic, ad revenue and influence over the way the rest of the media makes money, Facebook has grown into the most powerful force in the news industry,” wrote Times media columnist Farhad Manjoo

To recognize the potential of the Trump coalition, analysts would have had to visit places they had stopped visiting and listen to people they had stopped listening to.

What struck many as thin-skinned rants turned out to be brand-building, proving to Trump’s most loyal followers that he was a different kind of Republican, one that wasn’t much of a Republican at all.