The book is also a meta-document, an artifact of Republican mythmaking to come. Unlike most retellings of the 2016 election, The Great Revolt provides a cohesive, non-wild-eyed argument about where the Republican Party could be headed. Although it is not an explicit playbook for future campaigns, it’s intently focused on the voters who matter most for winning elections: those who flip. This political moment “is bigger than Trump,” says one voter, a former Pennsylvania union boss. “I don’t think there is any way to put what happened in 2016 back into some neat place. This is the new normal, people just don’t know that yet. Or maybe they just don’t want to know.”

According to Zito and Todd, roughly seven kinds of voters comprised the Trump coalition in 2016. They base these categories in part on a survey conducted for them by a Republican research firm—findings that aren’t all that useful. The survey mixes online and phone interviews “from professional third-party sample sources.” It relies on relatively small samples of narrow groups of voters to make questionably specific conclusions about those voters.* The truly interesting material comes from the mini-profiles scattered throughout the book, presumably drawn from Zito’s extensive reporting in the Midwest. The interviewees are given space to describe their lives in their own words—their relationships, work histories, anxieties, sense of politesse. This is the feeder material of intangible cultural impulses, which are often invisible in polling results but powerful in polling booths.

The authors give these voter archetypes goofy names—“Girl Gun Power,” for example, describes women largely under 45 who voted to protect their Second Amendment rights—but they can be described equally well in plain language. There are the hourly wage workers or laborers who recently went through personal or familial job losses. These voters are optimistic, the authors claim, but mistrustful of “big banks, big Wall Street, big corporations, the establishment of both parties and their lobbyists, and the big media corporations,” as one man puts it.

Some Trump supporters were nonideological, breaking a pattern of political disengagement to support a maverick candidate. “I just didn’t like and I never ever liked anyone who ran for office,” said a 70-year-old woman from one of the 10 largest counties to swing from Obama to Trump, according to Zito and Todd. “He was his own man,” the woman said. “I admired that.”

Other voters who had lived through a major crisis or setback felt drawn to Trump’s narrative of self-reinvention, Zito and Todd argue. “One of the things I really don’t get about the Democratic Party or the news media is the lack of respect they give to people who work hard all of their lives to get themselves out of the hole,” said a Michigan woman who owns a variety store. “It is as though they want to punish us for the very things we hold dear: hard work, no dependence on the government, no debt, and so on.”