October 12, 2005
Another View of Frank's 'Kansas'
by EDM Staff
Philip Klinkner has a post over at Polysigh http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2005/10/larry-bartels-on-whats-matter-with.html discussing Larry M.Bartels's critique of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas...
I would add to this that not only is Frank wrong about American politics overall, he's particularly wrong about Kansas. Frank makes it sound as though Kansas has abandoned a long history of supporting Democrats. That's just not true, since it has almost always been one of the most Republican states in the country. The table below gives the Republican % of the presidential vote for both Kansas and the U.S. for each presidential election since 1864 (the first in which Kansans voted). In addition, I've included where Kansas ranked among all states for Republican vote percent. As you can see, in 34 elections out of 36, Kansas has been more Republican than the rest of the nation, and 20 elections it has been among the top 10 Republican states in the country. The only two times that Kansas ran behind the Republican ticket nationally was in 1896 and 1912. The first of these was at the height of the Populist movement, but even then, Kansas was only 3.4 percentage points less Republican than the rest of the country and the Democratic/Populist ticket barely won a majority of the vote. The second time was in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt bolted from the Republican party. If you look at the combined vote for both Republican candidates (TR and Taft), it was 50.6 nationally, and 53.4 in Kansas.