What does that mean, I asked her?

“It’s kind of looking back in time, when the Midwest was driving the economic engine of the country, which it does in certain segments still. It was the Midwest that stood up for people,” she said. “So ‘heart’ is about, you know, the heart of America, the middle of America, but it is also about economics with heart, which means you’re looking out not just for the people at the top and the titans, you’re looking out for people who are … working the economy. And what the Midwest did, when you go way back to the early 1900s, it was the Midwest that stood up on the antitrust issue, and it wasn’t just the farmers and the grangers with their pitchforks, it was also the Chicago strikers with the Haymarket strike and the Pullman strike, and it was really a Midwest issue when you look at it.”

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She accepted that, of course, Teddy Roosevelt was busting trusts too, but “this is a political movement that started here, and it was a movement that said small farms matter, small businesses matter, entrepreneurship matters, that’s the engine, this is why our Founding Fathers moved from England, because they didn’t want to be controlled by monopolies and the East India Company, and when they did they got really mad and threw the tea into the water.”

She added, “Heartland economics is a focus on rural economics, which is very different in terms of critical access to hospitals, broadband, and making sure that [rural Americans] can have a piece of the action.” Just over a week later, she added to this by releasing what she called a “trillion dollar” agenda to modernize infrastructure, which included these issues, as well as improving and replacing roads, expanding public transportation, and ensuring clean drinking water. She then set off on a tour of the rural areas in the western part of the state, which included flood-damaged communities and a stop at the Heartland Forum, an event focused on rural America, which also featured Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, John Delaney, and Tim Ryan.

At the heart of “heartland economics” is a core political belief that has a grip on the American psyche. The Midwest is the heartland, never questioned, though it’s not where most of America lives, and stopped being representative of the economics or demographics of the country decades ago—if it ever was. Geographically it will always be the middle, but it’s not the middle or average in most other ways—nor does the reality for most midwesterners in 2019 look like scenes out of The Music Man. The Midwest has millions of acres of farmland, but so do California and Virginia and Mississippi and Oregon. The region is full of farmers desperate about corporate-agriculture takeovers and now trade wars, thanks to the Trump tariffs, but the pain and feelings of being left behind often have more to do with industries being hollowed out by automation and globalization, and little to do with crops.