Help us understand how important the General Motors factory was to Janesville. SUAREZ: You know, at first blush that sounds like an old story - a town where one big employer really dominates the town economically.

So I had this idea of taking a real close-up look at what was going on in one community that had lost a slew of jobs to try to find out what losing work really meant to people and to a community. And there was a lot of writing about voter anger, voter anxiety, and I realized that there wasn't a lot of writing that was putting the two together. GOLDSTEIN: Well, I began thinking as the Great Recession was ending - 2009, a little bit after that in 2010 - that there was a lot of writing going on about whether the country's economic policies were working. You decided to do something more like embedding. SUAREZ: A lot of a reporter's life is really more like parachuting into people's lives, getting what you need and then leaving. Her new book 'Janesville: An American Story' is about what she found.

She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, and she's been visiting one factory town in Wisconsin for the past six years.

That's not exactly what Amy Goldstein saw. Republicans said Trump's promises to bring back manufacturing jobs won over working-class voters. Wisconsin hadn't given its electoral votes to a Republican since 1984. All eyes turn to the Rust Belt where three states that voted for Democratic candidates since the 1980s helped Donald Trump win the election.

Factory town well