Salena Zito is the journalistic voice of fly-over America, though to be fair she mostly works the portion east of the Mississippi River. She has made the point repeatedly that the "bicoastals" of journalism don't "get" fly-over America and, if their writings are any indicator, have no interest in doing so.
Her column today, for The Washington Examiner, deals with blue collar areas in Ohio seemingly now lost to the Democrats. She writes something not entirely original but nevertheless profound about the tectonic shift that has marked politics since the millennium.
Ohio counties show America’s electoral trends that began incrementally in 2002, long before Trump floated down that escalator in August of 2015, and are a political trade created not by one man, but by years of the guardians of our culture in government, culture, entertainment, institutions, and the media isolating themselves in a cocoon of wealth, detachment, and disdain far from the people they serve, educate, entertain, and govern.
The national media missed this slow creep and mistakenly believed it was caused by Trump, missing that the middle of the country had been moving away from the Democrats and them for nearly a generation. He was not the cause but the result of the Democratic Party becoming more focused on issues such as transgender bathrooms and not on jobs and trade deals.
The Democrats have been taken over by a cluster of grievance groups whose shared sense of victimhood is almost all they have in common.
