WHISTLE STOPPING RIGHT PAST EAST PALESTINE.

In 2020, then candidate Joe Biden was on Norfolk Southern metals through eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and his train rolled right through East Palestine, Ohio.  Who knows, there might have been a few fans and voters trackside to watch.

Two years into the Jarrett regency came a freight train derailment and the senile figurehead figured sending an underling to do for safety vests what Michael Dukakis did for tanker helmets would be gesture enough.  Oops.  "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."

Donald Trump was still in the wilderness, but it's possible that when he showed up there, with a trailer load of supplies and a tab at McDonald's, it got him back to the White House.

On the eve of the 2020 election, 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.

The first time Donald Trump secured the presidency, the more reflective coastal cosmopolitans gave some thought to life in these United States away from the airports and the conference rooms.  Apparently, after 2020's elections, more than a few of them thought they could return to business as usual.

Their failures to think clearly, though, provide Youngstown State's Paul Sracic with material, and opportunities to engage with the fourth estate.

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, not subtracting, his universe 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.

And Mr Vance understands the value of return visits to East Palestine.

Sracic said he is 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."

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."

Whether the populist and corporatist factions of the Republican coalition will get along better than the communist and corporatists factions of the Democrat coalition remains to be seen.

In five years, or fifty, will psephologists be arguing over whether Old Joe, while he still had a few brain cells to rub together, would have done better tossing all the alphabet people out of his administration and going to East Palestine?