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.

It is a stretch of geography that includes bucolic rolling pastures, the gentle slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, traces of what once was powerful Steel Valley between New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, and a mix of decay of what once was and a rebuilding of what may be.

It is filled with people who work hard and stay because there is value to them to be intertwined with the lives that made them. Living not far from family was good for their future children. They could not justify moving away from that sense of community and belonging, so they stayed to make their hometowns better.

The region also is filled with people who have given up hope. This is where opportunity left when automation and trade deals left them behind with skills and work ethic that had no place to go. Once upon a time, they were the votes Democrats coveted, union men and women who were used as backdrops for the labor movement until climate change and international deals became more important and Democratic leaders stopped showing up.

Their despair is often chronicled as bitter or angry. It is not. It is the despair of the unseen. The unheard. The disrespected. They don’t want power. They want to be seen.

For decades, presidential candidates from either party have rarely shown up in places like East Palestine and Butler. The political calculation was simple: There seemed to be no political power here, the population is small, their industries are gone, and the pols really don’t know how to connect with their lives.

The pols didn’t see them.

What they missed is what the people here represent, explained Youngstown State University’s Paul Sracic, who said there are many thousands of 42-mile stretches just like this one all across this country — forgotten blue lines on U.S. maps that look just like this one and have people just like the people here.

“This is not a place where presidential candidates go, but it is where presidents can be elected or defeated,” said Sracic, who lives right in the thick of it.

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.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), then newly sworn into office and a son of Appalachia who grew up in a town very similar to East Palestine, was with Trump that day.

Sracic said when Trump and Vance went to East Palestine when they did, they were kind of political first responders.

In our interview on July 14, Trump told me repeatedly that the people at the Butler rally and the people in East Palestine were “his people, the greatest people in the country.”

Vance, Scracic said, is one of them. Born in Appalachian Ohio to a mother addicted to prescription drugs and a father absent from his life, and raised by his grandparents, he enlisted in the Marines and attended, as they say around here, “THE” Ohio State University, then Yale Law School.

Vance’s life story shows the value of meritocracy, Sracic said.

Vance, like Trump, understands the importance of showing up.

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.”

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.”