The Great Revolt

A CNN political analyst and a Republican strategist reframe the discussion of the "Trump voter" to answer the question, What's next?

"Unlike most retellings of the 2016 election, The Great Revolt provides a cohesive, non-wild-eyed argument about where the Republican Party could be headed."-The Atlantic

The political experts wrongly called the 2016 election and they keep blowing it-constantly predicting the coming demise of President Trump without pausing to consider the durability of the winds that swept him into office. 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.

The Great Revolt delves deep into the minds and hearts of the voters that make up the new populist-conservative coalition that brought Trump and Republican majorities into office. As the authors travel over 27,000 miles of back roads to interview more than three hundred Trump voters in ten Great Lake swing counties, they identify seven clusters of voters integral to the winning coalition.

The mass media ascribes Trump's election to angry, ugly impulses, but Zito and Todd reveal a coalition that defies those stereotypes. When encountered in the places and routines of their daily lives, these voters explain the deliberate, sometimes conflicted choices they made to support Trump that transcend one election.

Spanning a wide range of careers, economic classes, and prior electoral habits, these voters include ex-labor union leaders, newly pragmatic evangelicals, lifetime political cynics, and college-educated professionals who resisted the pull of a Clinton campaign message crafted just for them. Reacting to a culture increasingly driven by distant elites, these voters seek a movement larger than themselves, a cause that puts pragmatism above ideology, puts localism before globalism, and demands respect from Washington.

Pairing Zito's signature reporting with Todd's big- picture political and cultural analysis, The Great Revolt marries on-the-ground investigation with the hard data of electoral trends. Deeply rooted in the work-based, faith-driven traditional culture of the nation's interior states, the book reveals that the pivotal voters who unexpectedly turned the 2016 election had been hiding in plain sight-ignored by both parties, the media, and the political experts all at once.