[It was the tireless Sam Smith who dug this nugget out of the mastadon carcass of a George Packer article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all
Until the mid-seventies, the white working class--the heart of the New
Deal coalition--voted largely Democratic. Since the Carter years, the
percentages have declined from sixty to forty, and this shift has
roughly coincided with the long hold of the Republican Party on the
White House. The white working class--a group that often speaks of
itself, and is spoken of, as forgotten, marginalized, even despised--is
the golden key to political power in America, and it voted
overwhelmingly for George W. Bush twice, by seventeen per cent in 2000
and twenty-three per cent in 2004. Thomas Frank's 2004 book "What's the
Matter with Kansas?" directed its indignation at the baffling
phenomenon of millions of Americans voting year after year against
their economic self-interest. He concluded that the Republican Party
had tricked working people with a relentless propaganda campaign based
on religion and morality, while Democrats had abandoned these voters to
their economic masters by moving to the soft center of the political
spectrum. Frank's book remains the leading polemic about the white
reaction--the title alone has, for many liberals, become shorthand for
the conventional wisdom--but it is hobbled by the condescending
argument that tens of millions of Americans have become victims of a
"carefully cultivated derangement," or are simply stupid.
Last year, four sociologists at the University of Arizona, led by Lane
Kenworthy, released a paper that complicates Frank's thesis. Their
study followed the voting behavior of the forty-five per cent of white
Americans who identify themselves as working class. Mining electoral
data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in
white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period--from
the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the
early eighties--and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since.
But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion,
and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift.
Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment
that--during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions
practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated--the
Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. "Beginning in the
mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites
to question whether the Democrats were still better than the
Republicans at promoting their material well-being," the study's
authors write. Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to
embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative
movement. During Clinton's Presidency, the downward economic spiral of
these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the
Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic
reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there
because of the rising prominence of social issues--Thomas Frank's
argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class
because these voters no longer believed the Party's central tenet--that
government could restore a sense of economic security.
<end excerpt>
Michael