The most important 42 miles in American politics

BUTLER, Pennsylvania — The drive between Butler, Pennsylvania , and the Ohio village of East Palestine is less than 42 miles long. In between are the villages and boroughs of Lyndora, Connoquenessing, and Evans City on the Pennsylvania side before you cross the state line directly into the village of East Palestine.

It is a stretch of geography that includes bucolic rolling pastures, the gentle slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, traces of what once was powerful Steel Valley between New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, and a mix of decay of what once was and a rebuilding of what may be.

It is what is often referenced to by coastal elites who have never driven through this very Americana scenery as “flyover country” or “the middle of nowhere.”

It is filled with people who work hard and stay because there is value to them to be intertwined with the lives that made them. Living not far from family was good for their future children. They could not justify moving away from that sense of community and belonging, so they stayed to make their hometowns better.

The region also is filled with people who have given up hope. This is where opportunity left when automation and trade deals left them behind with skills and work ethic that had no place to go. Once upon a time, they were the votes Democrats coveted, union men and women who were used as backdrops for the labor movement until climate change and international deals became more important than these people did so Democratic leaders stopped showing up.

Their despair is often chronicled as bitter or angry. It is not. It is the despair of the unseen. The unheard. The disrespected. They don’t want power. They want to be seen.

For decades, presidential candidates from either party have rarely shown up in places like East Palestine and Butler. The political calculation was simple: There seemed to be no political power here, the population is small, their industries are gone, and the pols really don’t know how to connect with their lives.

The pols didn’t see them.

What they missed is what the people here represent, explained Youngstown State University’s Paul Sracic, who said there are many thousands of 42-mile stretches just like this one all across this country — forgotten blue lines on U.S. maps that look just like this one who have people just like the people here.

“This is not a place where presidential candidates go, but it is where presidents can be elected or defeated,” said Sracic, who lives right in the thick of it.

“Politicians on both sides of the aisle for the longest time did not understand that this 42-mile stretch and all of the other ones in this country that it represents was becoming ground zero in American politics,” Sracic said.

On the eve of the election in 2020, then-President Donald Trump showed up here in Butler for a rally that was one for the ages. People wondered why.

Seventeen months ago, he showed up in East Palestine after the devastating train derailment spewed deadly toxic chemicals throughout the village and the region. It was a visit President Joe Biden failed to make.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), then newly sworn into office and a son of Appalachia who grew up in a town very similar to East Palestine, was with Trump that day.

It shows, said Sracic, an expert on the shifts in American politics, how much we’ve really gone through a political realignment.

“The old Republican Party was an uncritical partner with big business such as Norfolk Southern,” he said. “But this new party is not reflexively pro-business. It understands business. It wants to do deregulation to help business, but when business does the wrong thing or isn't accountable, it is much more willing to hold them accountable.”

Sracic said when Trump and Vance went to East Palestine when they did, they were kind of political first responders.

“We talked about first responders, but they were political first responders representing the larger country, the larger political world that was going to pay attention to these people who feel ignored,” he said.

“These 42 miles represents a broad swath of the country, one could argue most of the country that basically feels ignored and by the media centers on the coasts and the power elite on the coasts, and now with Trump and Vance, they're finally kind of being spoken to,” he explained.

In our interview on Sunday , Trump told me repeatedly that the people at the Butler rally and the people in East Palestine were “his people, the greatest people in the country.”

Sracic said corporate media still fail to understand that despite the fact that Trump won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020, he had been mounting a campaign that was expanding his universe, not subtracting, long before Biden’s debate performance or the attempted assassination of Trump.

“They see it as tribal, and a lot of us, including me, kind of misunderstood at the beginning with the rallies. My own students who supported Trump in 2016 telling me the importance of the rallies, feeling once again that they're part of the whole,” he said.

“You have to remember that the people in these stretches of the country are not, as the book says, ‘bowling alone.’ They are joiners. They come from parents who join the Rotary Clubs and Elks, who coach Little League and are ushers at their church and, yes, bowling leagues,” he said. “They are the very essence of the Alexis de Tocqueville observation that Americans thrive in associations that bring them into shared concerns with their neighbors to give them voice to influence public opinion.”

Vance, he said, is one of them. Born in Appalachian Ohio to a mother addicted to prescription drugs and a father absent from his life and raised by his grandparents, he enlisted in the Marines and attended, as they say around here, “THE” Ohio State University and then Yale Law School.

Vance's life story shows the value of meritocracy, Sracic said.

“He rises up not because of the privilege that he was born in but because this is a country that gave him the opportunity to prove his worth, to prove his merit,” he said.

In short, none of us would've ever heard of Vance if he hadn't tested well enough to get into law school through these largely neutral testing regimes.

Vance, like Trump, understands the importance of showing up.

This past February, on the one-year anniversary of the train derailment in East Palestine, Vance pulled up to a local church in his pickup truck and stepped out of the driver’s side juggling two boxes of Oram’s donuts that he had picked across the state line in Pennsylvania. This was just one of many meetings he has held with locals since the train derailment that set off a massive fire and a billowing cloud of toxic smoke rolling over this community — followed days later by a toxic “controlled burn” meant to prevent an even larger explosion.

He greeted everyone there by their first name, grabbed a glazed bear claw from one of the donut boxes, and sat down with his constituents and asked them for an update, spending 90 minutes taking questions, pressing them for details, telling them what he believes the Environmental Protection Agency has gotten right and what it’s gotten wrong, and talking candidly about how sick he felt after his first visits here.

At the end of the meeting, he held a grief-stricken Lonnie Miller, who has lost her home and her small business and has barely held on to her marriage since the derailment.

Sracic said he is still stunned the media still do not get this.

“They still will as they continue to parachute in here and try to see America from their worldview, not the 42-mile people who decide elections,” he said.

Sracic said here is the genius about understanding the importance of showing up where there is seemingly no capital: “Right? There are no centers of power or influence here, no Wall Street, no big corporate headquarters, yet coming to places like here or Ashtabula, Ohio, or Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, or the Jersey Shore or the South Bronx is symbolic. People ‘see’ themselves there.”

East Palestine or Youngstown, Ohio, or Butler, Pennsylvania, are symbols, he said. “They are not just a place. After all, we know it's like declining in population, not that important politically anymore, but the type of people that are there — what happened there is the story of what happened in most of deindustrialized America.”

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This is the center of the political earthquake where we have seen what on paper shouldn’t have happened. These voters changed American politics. Trump intuitively understood that, and Vance is part of that evolution.

“For any political scientist to say that we don't have a realignment, they're not seeing what's right before them,” Sracic said. “All they have to do is drive these 42 miles.”