Chapter 4

I was born in late summer 1984, just a
few months before Papaw cast his first
and only vote for a Republican—Ronald
Reagan. Winning large blocks of Rust
Belt Democrats like Papaw, Reagan
went on to the biggest electoral
landslide in modern American history. “I
never liked Reagan much,” Papaw later
told me. “But I hated that son of a bitch
Mondale.” Reagan’s Democratic
opponent, a well-educated Northern