I’m a Tom Frank fan. I think he’s a wonderful and passionate writer. But, now a respected political scientist is arguing that the “Great Backlash” Frank chronicled in his last book, in which “conservatives won the heart of America” and created a “dominant political coalition” by convincing Kansans and blue-collar, working-class people to vote against their own economic interests in order to defend traditional cultural values against bicoastal elites “isn’t actually happening–at least, not in anything like the way Frank portrays.” (Thanks to Doug Henwood–editor of the invaluable Left Business Observer and longtime Nation contributing editor–for turning me on to this new study.)
In a fascinating paper called “What’s the Matter With What’s the Matter with Kansas?“, Princeton professor Larry Bartels uses data from National Election Study (NES) surveys to test Frank’s thesis. He examines class-related patterns of issue preferences, partisanship, and voting over the past half-century. Bartels concludes that the white working class hasn’t moved right and that “moral values” are not pushing them to vote Republican.
Moreover, for the most part, voters’ economic and cultural attitudes are either both liberal or both conservative rather than the bifurcated split Frank sees. Bartels also disproves the argument that there’s been a long-term decline in turnout.
Here’s a summary of the report’s findings if you don’t have time to read the full 43 page paper, first presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association this September. You can also click here to listen to Henwood’s interview with Bartels.
Conclusions:
* Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites–and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era–itself a holdover from the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
* Has the white working class become more conservative? No. The typical views of low-income whites have remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years. (A pro-choice shift on abortion in the 1970s and ’80s has been partially reversed since the early 1990s.) Their positions relative to more affluent white voters–generally less liberal on social issues and less conservative on economic issues–have also remained virtually unchanged.
* Do working class “moral values” trump economics in determining voting patterns? No. Social issues (including abortion) are less strongly related to party identification and presidential votes than economic issues, and that is even more true for whites in the bottom third of the income distribution than for more affluent whites. Moreover, while social issue preferences have become more strongly related to presidential votes among middle- and high-income whites, there is no evidence of a corresponding trend among low-income whites.
* Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? No. For church-goers as for non-church-goers, partisanship and voting behavior are primarily shaped by economic issues, not cultural issues.
Click here to read the full study and let’s hope that Democratic Party strategists are doing the same.
