A bonus episode with James Menendez in St. Louis, Missouri. With Midwesterners on both the Democrats' and Republicans' presidential tickets, James asks what it means to be a Midwesterner.
Hello.
This is James Menendez with a special edition of the NewsHour podcast.
And it's coming to you from Missouri in the United States.
And the reason we've come to Missouri and the american Midwest is because the whole idea of the Midwest, well, it's at the forefront of people's minds as we head into November's presidential election.
There's a pretty simple reason for that.
Two states in the Midwest, Michigan and Wisconsin, are both very important swing states for both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Also, both the presidential nominees have picked people from the Midwest as their running mates.
JD Vance for the Republicans and Tim Walls for the Democrats.
He's the governor of Minnesota.
JD Vance is from Ohio.
He was one of the senators in Ohio.
So we thought, first of all, it'd be interesting to find out what is the Midwest, what makes a midwesterner, what makes this region important, whether people are proud of being a midwesterner.
Because, frankly, it's often overlooked by other parts of the United States and certainly overlooked by the politicians in Washington, DC.
That's certainly what people tell you.
Anyway, we've come, as you can probably hear, to what is a very noisy rodeo here in a town called defiance, just outside St.
Louis, Missouri.
And we've come to talk to people to get their views on what is a midwesterner.
We drink soda, not pop.
We have pork steaks, toasted raviolis.
We live in Missouri, not Missoura.