If Hillary Clinton had read this volume she would never have ignored the Midwest. The Democrats took the Midwest for granted in 2016 because, for more than twenty years, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin had leaned Democratic in presidential elections. But the chapters in this volume show that that famous blue wall was never so sturdy. The history of conservative resurgence in the Midwest has largely been ignored, despite a burgeoning scholarship about conservatism in the West, South, and Northeast. Ronald Reagan, after all, hailed from Dixon, Illinois, and spent the formative years of his life in the Midwest, developing a vision of America that he spent the rest of his life trying to get America to embrace.
The idea to explore conservatism in the heartland—including more Republican states beyond the blue wall—is a good one, but this book is wildly uneven, lacking both an organizing framework and clear...