ABSTRACT
Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? asserts that the Republican Party has forged a new "dominant political coalition" by attracting working-class white voters on the basis of "class animus" and "cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion." My analysis confirms that white voters without college degrees have become significantly less Democratic; however, the contours of that shift bear little resemblance to Frank's account. First, the trend is almost entirely confined to the South, where Democratic support was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era of legalized racial segregation. (Outside the South, support for Democratic presidential candidates among whites without college degrees has fallen by a total of one percentage point over the past half-century.) Second, there is no evidence that "culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern" among Frank's working-class white voters. The apparent political significance of social issues has increased substantially over the past 20 years, but more among better-educated white voters than among those without college degrees. In both groups, economic issues continue to be most important. Finally, contrary to Frank's account, most of his white working-class voters see themselves as closer to the Democratic Party on social issues like abortion and gender roles but closer to the Republican Party on economic issues.
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Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? provides a colorful and passionate account of the emergence of a new "dominant political coalition" uniting "business and blue-collar" in an increasingly conservative Republican Party (2004, 8). In Frank's telling, "conservatives won the heart of America" by convincing Kansans and other people of modest means to vote against their own economic interests in a vain effort to defend traditional cultural values against radical bicoastal elites. The result is "a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting" (2004, 109). As for the working-class cultural conservatives who provide the crucial votes,
All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages,
more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports
itself like King Farouk--and, of course, a crap culture whose moral
free fall continues, without significant interference from the
grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to
Washington every couple of years. (136)
Of course, the notion that American politics has been transformed by the defection from the Democratic ranks of working-class conservatives is not new. As long ago as Richard Nixon's first year in the White House, Kevin Phillips (1969) published an attention-getting blueprint for constructing The Emerging Republican Majority along neopopulist conservative lines. Ladd and Hadley (1975, 240, 232) proclaimed "an inversion of the old class relationship in voting" due to "the transformations of conflict characteristic of postindustrialism." Huckfeldt and Kohfeld (1989, 84) argued that "race served to splinter the Democratic coalition" because the policy commitments of the Civil Rights era provoked "[r]acial hostility, particularly on the part of lower-status whites." And Edsall and Edsall (1991, 154) argued that "Working-class whites and corporate CEOs, once adversaries at the bargaining table, found common ideological ground in their shared hostility to expanding government intervention."
What Frank's "stew of memoir, journalism and essay" (Brownstein 2004) adds to these works, aside from a good deal of fascinating local color, is a more pointed account of the cultural discontent fueling the "Great Backlash"--and an impassioned denunciation of "a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people" by enticing them to vote on the basis of "cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns" (Frank 2004, 6, 245).
The supposedly decisive role of "values voters" in the 2004 election seems to reinforce both the empirical force and the political significance of Frank's analysis. While academics derided the exit poll finding that "moral values" were the most important issue in the campaign, journalists and pundits seized on the notion that working-class cultural conservatives swung the election to the Republicans. Indeed, in a piece written even before the votes were counted, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (2004a) wrote that Kerry supporters "should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers, and waitresses who ended up voting--utterly against their own interests--for Republican candidates." Kristof praised What's the Matter With Kansas? as "the best political book of the year," citing approvingly Frank's assertion that "Democratic leaders have been so eager to win over suburban professionals that they have lost touch with blue-collar America."
But have they? My aim here is to subject Frank's thesis to systematic empirical examination. I do not propose to question Frank's account of what has happened on the ground in Kansas. Insofar as he reports on actual political events, they mostly involve the efforts of social conservatives to wrest control of the state's Republican Party apparatus from its traditional, somewhat more moderate conservative leadership. This is a significant political story with parallels in many parts of the country (Cohen forthcoming). But it is a story about internecine conflict among Republican Party activists, not a story about h