The quest in America’s newsrooms to identify and understand the Trump voter in traditionally bluer areas of the country began just hours after the polls closed. On November 9, fewer than 24 hours after Trump’s victory, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel took the local temperature in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. There, locals were elated by the idea of the incoming administration. But the piece took an anthropological turn when it not only asked why that would be but implied an answer.

These people were examples of a society in crisis, driven not by aspiration but desperation. After all, look at their surroundings? A restaurant, “one of the few thriving businesses on Merchant Street, which old-timers—and there are now mostly old-timers—remember as once so crowded you bumped into people. Now it’s largely deserted.”

As the piece went on, the report’s Western Pennsylvanian setting became another character in the story. Its demography (“largely white, less educated”), its declining population, its post-industrial blight, and its shockingly high unemployment rates provided not just color but a theory of everything.