Hello this is James Menendez with a special edition of the News Hour Podcast and it's coming to you

from Missouri in the United States and the reason we've come to Missouri and the American Midwest is because the whole

idea of the Midwest, well it's at the forefront of people's minds as we head into November's

presidential election.

There's a pretty simple reason for that.

Two states in the Midwest, Michigan and Wisconsin,

are both very important swing states

for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Also, both the

presidential nominees have picked people from the Midwest as their running

mates, JD Vance for the Republicans and Tim Walls for the Democrats.

He's the governor of Minnesota.

JD Vance is from Ohio.

He was one of the senators in Ohio.

So we thought first of all it would be interesting to find out

what is the Midwest, what makes a Midwesterner, what makes this region important

whether people are proud of being a mid-Westerner, because frankly,

it's often overlooked by other parts of the United States and certainly overlooked by the

politicians in Washington, D.C. That's certainly what people tell you anyway we've

come as you can probably hear to what is a very noisy rodeo here in a town called

Defiance just outside St Louis Missouri and we've come to talk to people

to get their views on what is a mid-Westerner. He goes to be running to be here at the top.

We can qualify right on the roof.

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