“Blue-collar optimists, evangelical pragmatists and suburban vacillators"

In City Journal, Fred Siegel tells us about a book by Salena Zito and Brad Todd.

...“On the back roads and side streets of places like Erie, Pa., and Kenosha, Wis.” emerged voters who never seemed to figure in the networks’ reporting. They were “blue-collar optimists, evangelical pragmatists and suburban vacillators who turned the dials just enough to shock the body politic”—part of a white electorate that, notes analyst Lloyd Green, had seen the loss of more than 700,000 jobs between November 2007 and late 2016.

...Zito and Todd see the 2016 election as representing a tectonic shift in America’s electoral plates. “Far from a fluke, the 2016 election was a product of Obama’s globalist conceits that produced defective trade deals, open borders and an aggressive secularism.” Trump’s victory was his triumph, not the Republican Party’s. Neither the two-time Obama voters who switched to Trump nor the habitual nonvoters who came out to the polls in 2016 saw much to rally around in the GOP. Their ties are to Trump, a finding with implications for the upcoming midterms.

Read more here.