When workers decades ago spoke the words, 'This is a union town!' they were describing not just a statistical fact but, more importantly, a lived and embedded reality. Unions, as Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write, represented 'a dense social web of interconnected workers, family members and neighbors.' Rust Belt Union Blues is an immensely important book, both for politics and for the social sciences. Politically, it explains why many white workers strayed from their old Democratic loyalties not because their views changed radically but because of transformations in their reference points and the ways they answered the need for community. Rust Belt Union Blues also calls on social scientists to enrich and go beyond survey research by paying far more attention to the networks people build and the lives they live. This book deserves wide readership–and may it encourage more volumes like it.–E.J. Dionne Jr., author of Why the Right Went Wrong, coauthor of 100% Democracy