In The Great Revolt Salena Zito and Brad Todd challenge readers to view the winning 2016 coalition through the lens of not only partisan realignment but also of broader cultural change-and beyond the prism of a single candidacy-Dust jacket flap.
This sympathetic frustrating book is part of the Great Correction, the post-2016 attempt to understand the Trump voters whom the journalists, strategists and others the authors lump together as 'the professional left' failed to appreciate before Election Day.
To be sure, Zito and Todd pull some punches. Most glaringly, they discount the role of race in the race, with not a word about Pepe the Frog, Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to distance himself from David Duke. Similarly, they ignore the fact that Trump’s margin among white voters was actually 1% greater than Ronald Reagan’s in his 1984 landslide over Walter Mondale ... but they paint a portrait of Trump’s base that is not standard GOP-issue, and a Democratic party overly reliant upon its upstairs-downstairs bicoastal coalition ... a book which provides food for thought.
People struggling to understand what is happening in American politics would do well to read this fascinating book co-written by one of the first journalists to see what was happening to a key slice of the electorate — the white working class in the upper Midwest. And Salena Zito, who was based in Pittsburgh, had a clear view of what was happening well before the stunning election of 2016. ... The former blue-collar Democrats have gone through some of the most radical change in recent years due to technology, global wage competition and cultural changes.
