What's the Matter with Larry Bartels?

Thomas Frank and Larry Bartels offer different interpretations of working class voting in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Thomas Frank, in What’s The Matter With Kansas and other articles argues that the nation’s working class neglected its economic self interest in supporting Republican candidates such as George W. Bush. With special emphasis on the 2004 election, Frank illustrates how the Republicans, under the leadership of Karl Rove, became adept at convincing working class voters that the Republicans could best protect their interests on the “social” or “wedge” issues such as abortion, prayer in the schools and gay marriage. Bartels, in an effort to discredit the work of Frank, offers a highly restricted definition of lower-income voters that all but excludes a large portion of workers in the middle class. Bartels also ignores a long history of Republican efforts to woo the middle classes going back to Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Overall, Frank offers the more convincing and compelling analysis.

Even a cursory glance at the political history of the United States since the 1960s confirms the long, successful efforts to portray the Democrats as unreliable and dangerous outsiders of one sort or another and the Republicans as the real friends of working class people. This began with Richard Nixon’s appeal to the “Great Silent Majority” and his successful campaign to paint the Democrats as soft on crime, pro-welfare radicals. By 1972 Nixon’s C.R.E.E.P. successfully derided George McGovern as the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.” George H.W. Bush and his campaign manager Lee Atwater took this sort of campaign to a whole new level in 1988 in portraying Michael Dukakis as an unreliable liberal who would endanger school prayer, promote abortion and let dangerous criminals out of jail. This campaign strategy did not arise, de novo, in 2000; it had been around for decades; it worked; to deny that working class people were coming over to the Republican Party in droves defies both common sense and an examination of any political history of those decades.

Also troubling in Bartels’ analysis is his very narrow, restrictive definition of “working class” as those making under $35,000 per year. Certainly there are many in the working class making far more than that. Beyond that, it is too restrictive to attempt a quantitative definition of working class, which is really more of a state of mind or cultural inclination than something to be measured with numbers.

While Frank presented a dire portrait of the state of the Democratic Party in 2005, the November 2008 election, and the breadth and depth of Barack Obama’s victory, give Democrats abundant reasons for optimism. Certainly most of the reliably Republican red states remained red, including Kansas. But Obama was able to win back both Ohio and Florida, which had gone to the Republican column both times for Bush. Beyond that, Obama made inroads into areas previously deemed red or at least purple, such as Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada. Theories abound explaining the Obama victory, but surely a large part of his success lay in the fact that, as exit polls indicate, economics trumped the social issues for many voters in 2008, and the Democrats likely won back voters wooed away by the Republicans over several decades. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15270.html