Hey, good morning. I'm Playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Friday, December 22nd.

We have a bit of an inside joke on the Playbook team that our deputy editor, Zach Stanton,

thinks the entire universe revolves around McComb County, Michigan. That's where he's from.

A book you read, he'll probably tell you the author is from that area. Some scandal, it started in those Detroit suburbs. Such and such a significant election. Oh, he'll tell you, McComb County probably tipped the scale.

Zach's not wrong. The county has been at the center of the political universe for nearly half a century. It is, as Zach writes in a piece up today, the closest thing there is to a

de facto capital of white middle America. Every presidential campaign for the last 40 years has been in a

large part a battle to appeal to these voters. Today, Zach looks at why. How did this area become such a

major force? And joining me now to discuss his breezy 17,000 word political

magazine piece answering such questions is the man himself. Good morning, Zach.

Good morning, Rachel. Thanks so much. So tell us about your story, Zach. Sure. So I am from

McComb County, as you mentioned. And the year that I was born, 1985, is actually the same year

that it kind of really entered the political map. Democrats had really dominated McComb County

for a long time. In 1960, it was the most heavily Democratic suburban county in the United States.

By 1984, it had swung totally in the opposite direction,

and many of these disaffected Democrats voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. And the Democratic

Party and their allies were curious why this was happening. So in 1985, they invited in a

pollster named Stanley Greenberg. And Mr. Greenberg looked at basically

what was leading these socially conservative Democrats to stop voting for the Democratic Party,

particularly at the top of the ticket. And what he found was basically what came to be known as

the Reagan Democrat. And the Reagan Democrat

is a voter who is socially conservative, economically liberal, generally blue collar. And

the battle for these voters has really defined our politics for the last, you know, 40 years

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