Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. A couple things before we get in.

Number one, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see my fake background in poor

lighting.

That's because I am on the road for Sauggers Bachelor Party.

The show must go on, of course, but a huge congrats to Saugher that I'm sure you guys all would like to share with him.

Also, we're on a slightly delayed schedule this week because of the Memorial Day holiday,

but once again, the show must go on. I recorded this episode last week with Stephanie Turlow,

she's a professor at Harvard, and she's written a new book, How the Heartland Went Red,

why Local Forces Matter in an age of nationalized politics.

This book gets at the core of I think one of the most fascinating realignment error conversations.

Two questions are basically answered in this book.

Number one, why did the Heartland

real line away from the Democrats post-1970s?

What does that mean then for 2016 and 2024?

And of course, this broader question that she gets into the book specifically

around whether local forces matter more in national politics than you would actually think.

Because what she does in this book is look at three different

heartland cities and actually what she discovers is despite the fact that we kind

of think that everything is about national politics and that all those things that

are happening in our local directions don't really matter as much the states that went less to the right and

stayed more blue traditionally actually had specific local forces, dynamics, and

...