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Hey John, how you doing?

I'm doing fine. I'm hanging in there. How are you doing, Glenn? I'm doing okay. Welcome to the Glenn show.

Pleasure to be here. I am indeed Glenn Lowry, Brown University Department of Economics and the Watson Institute for International Public Affairs, this is the Glenn show at blogheads. TV.

It's my pleasure to be talking with John Shields, who's associate professor of government in Claremont McKenna College out there in California and author of a book

Trumps Democrats that we are here to discuss. So John let me not try to tell people what this book is about. I think the title is very indicative of the general area of inquiry.

You're trying to figure out who these Democrats are who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and what that all means for the future of American politics.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about your project?

The book is joint, I should say, with Stephanie Maravich? Maravch. Maravch, I beg your part in Stephanie. But anyway, John, good to be talking to you about your book. What are you guys up to?

Yeah, thanks, Glenn. Well, the origins of this book, you know, began on election night in 2016 and and, you know, that was one of the most surprising political events of my lifetime and

and really my surprise our surprise really deepened in the weeks and days that

followed because we discovered that there were many Obama counties,

206 of them that flipped and voted for Trump and as we dug deeper we discovered

that many of these places had not just voted for Obama, but they had been loyal to the Democratic

Party for a long time. So, you know, there's nearly 100 counties that had not voted for a Republican

since the 80s.

Others had not voted for a Republican president

since 72, you know, and they flipped for Reagan.

And then there was a handful of places, Glenn,

that had really pretty unbroken records of voting for Democratic presidential candidates stretching really back before the New Deal.

In fact, there was one place, this is really

astonishing, there was one place that had never voted for a Republican in the

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