ABSTRACT: The widely believed claim that many voters in American elections are voting against their economic interests (“lower income Republicans versus affluent Democrats”) in favor of their social or cultural values is not supportable by the data concerning class voting patterns. American voters are polarized on both a class and cultural basis. Economic polarization takes place on a national level, and cuts across regional and local boundaries, with rich Americans overwhelmingly voting for the Republicans and poor Americans leaning strongly towards the Democrats. Cultural polarization represents intra-class conflict within the middle class, primarily the upper middle class, with affluent people in wealthier states voting for the Democrats and persons with a comparable class position in the poorer states voting Republican. Furthermore, the “red-state/blue-state” electoral map represents conflict not between states per se as much as conflict between ideologically polarized Congressional districts, local communities, counties and neighborhoods.
————————————————————————————–
In recent years a stereotype has emerged in American politics. The picture
presented by much of the media is one of lower income persons voting Republican and upper income persons voting Democratic. In other words, many people have started voting against their own economic interests in favor of their cultural values, with upper income, urban, educated, cosmopolitan elites voting for liberal social policies, and lower income, rural, religious voters favoring conservative policies. This image is often depicted on electoral maps as the “red state/blue state” divide with the socially conservative red state poor and working class pitted against affluent but socially liberal
residents of the blue states. This picture is widely accepted, but is it true? Is it an accurate depiction of the class and cultural divisions among voters? The evidence indicates that it is not. The available data shows that the voting patterns of the poor are reliably Democratic. Instead, the red state/blue state divide is symptomatic of cultural conflict among middle to upper-middle income persons, and of intra-class conflict among the affluent or wealthy.
A leading and perhaps most well-known proponent of the “poor conservatives versus rich liberals” thesis is Thomas Frank, who outlined his views in the popularized work What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Frank provides a straightforward summary of his views:
If you earn over $300,000 a year, you owe a great deal to this derangement. Raise a glass sometime to those indigent High Plains Republicans as you contemplate your good fortune: It is thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by the estate tax, or troublesome labor unions, or meddling banking regulators. Thanks to the allegiance of these sons and daughters of toil, you have escaped what your affluent forebears used to call “confiscatory” income tax levels. It is thanks to them that you were able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of one and get that Segway with the special gold trim. (Frank, 2004, p. 2)
According to Frank, Republicans have been able to successfully appeal to the social conservatism of blue collar workers and the rural poor on cultural controversies like abortion, gay rights, immigration, the role of religion in public life, gun control and affirmative action. Frank sees this as a “bait and switch” tactic on the part of the Republican Party, whereby working class voters are pushed to vote according to their cultural values, and are then given economic policies that are harmful to their own interests. Frank describes what he regards as the consequences of this arrangement:
Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.(Frank, 2004, p. 7)
Liberals who agree with Frank’s analysis will argue that working class Republican voters are under the grip of what the Marxists call “false consciousness,” meaning such voters are distracted by what the Left would consider to be religious superstition, irrational prejudices like racism or homophobia or conservative economic propaganda generated by
corporate-funded think tanks and media outlets. Allegedly, such distractions prevent working people from perceiving and voting for their rational economic self-interest.
Even some conservatives will agree with Frank’s general thesis, but from a polar opposite perspective. These conservatives will argue working class Republicans really do perceive their economic interests accurately, and that it is perfectly legitimate for workers to desire tax cuts in order to increase their take-home pay and deregulatory policies that ostensibly accelerate economic growth and therefore job creation and rising living standards. (Gelman, Park, Shor, Bafumi, Cortina, 2008, p. 16) An even more extreme argument is offered by the neoconservative commentator David Brooks, who suggests
that because the red state/blue divide appears to be driven more by cultural and social issues than by class or economic ones, that perhaps the idea of “class,” which he derides as “Marxist” in nature, is not applicable to American society at all. Brooks sees Americans divided on the basis of cliques rather than classes, with these cliques being comparable to the various teenage subcultures one might find at a high school, such as “nerds, jocks, punks, bikers, techies, druggies, God Squadders,” etc. (Brooks, 2001)
The methodology utilized by commentators like Frank and Brooks is
problematical. Frank relies very heavily on anecdotal evidence gathered from his experiences with Republican-leaning, working-class Kansas communities of the kind that he grew up around. He provides examples like a friend’s father, a man with liberal economic views but whose Catholic religious beliefs led him to the pro-life Republicans. (Frank, 2001, p. 4) Much of Frank’s work includes sweeping political, cultural and historical analysis with very little in raw statistical data provided as supporting evidence. Likewise, many of Brooks’ arguments are anecdotal in nature, relying on his personal experiences of living in an upper class liberal community and his ventures into conservative working class towns and conversing with the locals.
What Does the Data Show?
The most comprehensive and up to date analysis of the available data concerning voting patterns in relation to class position, income, occupation and cultural background is provided by Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shar, Joseph Bafumi and Jeronimo Cortina. This group of scholars published their research in 2008 under the title Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote The Way They Do. Contra Frank, these researchers found that the image of “working class conservatives versus affluent liberals” is a false one, arguing instead that “lower-income Americans don’t, in general, vote Republican-and, where they do, richer voters go Republican even more so.” With regards to Kansas, for instance, that particular state has leaned Republican by ten percent greater than the national average for sixty years, and the real source of Republican strength in Kansas is the middle to upper classes. (Gelman, 2008, pp. 14-15)
Political scientist Larry Bartels argues that it is only in the South that the trend of whites without college education voting Republican has emerged.(Bartels, 2006) Even so, Gelman, Park, et.al. found that in the 2004 presidential election the “poor vote” went to Democratic candidate John Kerry in all of the Southern states except Texas!(Gelman, 2008) Bartels maintains that there is no identifiable pattern of white working class voters favoring cultural issues over economic ones. Jeffrey Stonecash argues that “the last 40 years shows a growing class division in American politics, with less affluent whites more supportive of Democrats now than 20-30 years ago. Indeed, even in Kansas less affluent legislative districts are much more supportive of Democrats than affluent districts.”(Stonecrash, 2005)
The evidence indicates that the rich are overwhelmingly Republican in their
voting preferences. Republican candidate George W. Bush only won thirty-six percent of the vote from those earning less than $15,000 annually in the 2004 election. Among those earning over $200,00 Bush obtained sixty-two percent of the vote. (Gelman, 2008, p. 9) As mentioned, Bush’s home state of Texas was the only southern state where Bush won the “poor people” vote in the 2004 election. Yet even in Texas there was a significant class division in voting patterns. In Zavala County, the poorest Texas locality, Bush won
twenty-five percent of the vote. However, in the wealthiest Texas community, Collin County, Bush won seventy-one percent of the vote. The capital city of Austin is located in Travis County, where the mean income of $45,000 is solidly middle class, and where Bush received fifty-three percent of the vote. (Gelman, 2008, p. 12)
Voting patterns indicate that poor voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, as are racial minorities. This is not to say that there are no significant cultural differences among the poor. After all, “the poor” can include everything from rural Alabama whites who belong to the Ku Klux Klan to black street gang members in the inner city areas. Yet there is no evidence that such differences play significant roles in American electoral politics. Many poor people do not vote at all. Those who do are, by a wide margin, consistently Democratic-leaning. The growing gap between socio-economic groups that has escalated over the past thirty years has been widely documented, but this growing divide between rich and poor is not the source of the red state/blue state divide.
The evidence supports the conclusion that the red state/blue state divide has its roots in cultural conflict within middle to upper-middle income groups. As Gelman summarizes:
There is still a rich-poor divide in voting, in popular perceptions of the Democrats and Republicans, and in the parties’ economic policies. But voting patterns have been changing, and the red-blue map captures some of this. The economic battles have not gone away, but they intersect with cultural issues in a new way. In low-income states such as Mississippi and Alabama, richer people were far more likely to vote (Republican)…But in richer states such as New York and California, income is not a strong predictor of individual votes. (Gelman, 2008, p. 17)
In the poor states, the pattern of wealthy people voting Republican and poor people voting Democratic is very reliable. In states where the mean income is more in the middle, the pattern begins to blur somewhat, and in the wealthiest states, income is not a determining factor in voting patterns. While the middle to upper classes in wealthier states are just as likely to favor the Democrats as poor people, the same socio-economic groups in the poor states are more likely to favor the Republicans. To break it down further on a regional basis, Democrats only win the “rich vote” in the most liberal states. For instance, in the 2004 election the Democrats won the vote of those with an income of over $200,000 annually in only four states: California, Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and New York. Middle class support for the Democratic Party is the strongest in the Northeast, parts of the upper Midwest/Great Lakes region, and on the West Coast. To break it down to the level of local communities, affluent to wealthy urban people tend to lean towards the Democrats, even though the majority of affluent people are Republicans. The wealthiest states are also those which are the most urbanized. (Gelman, 2008, p. 19-20)
A key question that arises from these observations concerns the matter of why voting patterns are more divided on the basis of income in poor states. These patterns are relatively new. For instance, in the 1976 presidential election, the Democrat Jimmy Carter won the South, and the Republican Gerald Ford won California, New Jersey and parts of New England. In the 1976 election, the level of correlation between the wealth of a state and partisan sympathies was relatively small. Why do affluent people in poor
states hold such greater differences in their political allegiances than poor people when compared to affluent people in wealthier states? Gelman and associates offer four primary explanations:
1. Race. Division between races is the most evident in poor states in the South. This racial division overlaps with a class division. Because of the relationship between race and class position, economic policies such as social welfare programs that involve transfer payments from rich or affluent persons to the poor are seen as race-based entitlements for African-Americans.
2. Religion. Wealthier people in the poor states attend church more regularly or frequently than poor people, and are also more likely to belong to conservative religious denominations than persons with comparable levels of wealth in richer states.
3. Geography and history. The wealthier states have a much larger number of unionized workers, more large cities, and stronger immigrant communities, thereby creating a more liberal political and cultural atmosphere in these states. A direct correlation exists between cosmopolitanism and Democratic voting patterns.
4. Mobility. Middle to upper income persons have greater freedom and ability to choose where they will live and whom they will associate with. For instance, affluent persons with liberal social or cultural views tend to migrate towards urban enclaves such as Portland, Seattle, Madison, Minneapolis, San Francisco or Montgomery County, Maryland where such views are most prevalent. (Gelman, 2008, p. 22)
Political polarization in the United States occurs on two levels, the economic and the cultural. A divide exists not only between rich and poor, but between affluent Americans holding different cultural values. Analysts differ as to the causes of this polarization. Political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal attempt to explain contemporary American political polarization as an outgrowth of growing income inequality. Between the 1920s and the mid-1970s, patterns of wealth distribution in the United States were comparable to those of other nations with relatively similar levels of
economic, industrial and technological development. However, economic inequality has grown immensely in the United States in the last thirty-five years, and at a much greater rate than what can be found in other comparable nations. McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal also point out that this wealth gap has appeared within the individual American states, and not among them. The growth of wealth inequality has transpired on a class rather than sectional basis. (McCarty, Poole, Rosenthal, 2008)
Since the mid-1970s, many of the more underdeveloped areas of the U.S. have improved their economic standing. Wealthy people in wealthy states have been have been getting rich at a quicker pace, while poor people in poor states have been rising out of poverty at a quicker pace. This is no doubt attributable to a variety of causes, including the growth of the industrial base of the so-called Sunbelt, the effects of tax cuts and deregulation policies implemented by several administrations, and the expansion of
the welfare state as a barrier to total poverty. Economic inequality has also grown in Democratic states and decreased in Republican ones. Concerning economic policies that primarily affect individuals, Republicans will generally favor the affluent while Democrats will favor the low-income. However, Gelman and associates point out that there is deviation from this pattern when it comes to policies that affect regions, states or local communities. In some instances, Democrats will favor more affluent communities while Republicans will favor poor localities. Gelman observes that “one might see certain
policy areas where Democratic officeholders, as friends of the rich areas, become friends of the rich people, for example, in supporting the federal tax deduction for state income tax (which benefits taxpayers, especially upper-income taxpayers, in New York and California).” (Gelman, 2008, pp. 61-62) Also, interstate social transfer payments are greater from Democratic states to Republican states rather than vice versa. The richest ten states receive only eighty cents in federal spending for every dollar paid in taxes while the poorest ten states receive $1.60. (Gelman, 2008, p. 62) The evidence indicates that while economic inequality is indeed growing, this expanding class divide is not expressed in regional divisions and cannot explain the conventional “red state/blue state” political
polarization.
The Voting Patterns
It has been mentioned that in the 2004 presidential election, the “rich people vote” (persons earning more than $200,000 a year) went overwhelmingly for the Republicans, with the votes of this group going to the Democrats in only four states. In the same election, the Democrats won the middle income vote (between $15,000 and $200,000) in California, Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and all of the northeastern states from Maryland upward. The Republicans won the “poor people” vote (less than
$15,000) only in Bush’s home state of Texas, Indiana, and the sparsely populated western states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and the Dakotas.
It is much more striking to observe the voting patterns with regards to church
attendance. In the 2004 election the Republicans won the votes of those who attend church at least once a week in forty-eight of the fifty states! The Democrats won the votes of regular churchgoers only in Maryland and Massachusetts. Among semi-regular churchgoers, the Democrats won fourteen states: California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arkansas, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. The Republicans won the
votes of non-churchgoers only in ten states: Texas, Idaho, Utah, South Dakota, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina.
According to the World Values Survey, the United States is unique in that it is the only one of the world’s wealthier nations with a high level of religiosity. (Inglehart, 2005)) Some observers attribute this to the fact that many Americans are descended from immigrants who were often from the poorest and most religious sectors of the countries from where they came. The comparatively high level of economic inequality in the U.S. makes the nation more likely to display characteristics more common to poor countries
like a greater amount of religious practice or belief. Still another explanation is America’s tradition of separation of church and state. The lack of an established national church opens up the “religion market” to competition among a wide variety of denominations and sects that must rely on the voluntary participation and contributions of adherents in order to remain active. (Gelman, 2008, pp. 76-77)
It would certainly appear on the surface that the “red/blue divide” simply reflects the polarization between the religious and the non-religious and that this polarization is played out in terms of party loyalty and voting patterns. The reputation of the Republican Party as the “Party of God” is a relatively new phenomenon. The identifiable pattern of religious people voting Republican by a significant margin did not appear until the 1992
presidential election when the incumbent George H. W. Bush obtained twenty percent greater support among those who church attendance was consistent than among those who were not regular church goers. (Gelman, 2008, p. 84) While Ronald Reagan received the enthusiastic support of the newly organized “religious right” in the 1980 and 1984 elections, the data shows that the impact of the religious vote in those two elections was actually less significant that it had been in the election between Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter in 1976 (Gelman, 2008, p. 86)
The overall level of religiosity in the United States has decreased significantly
since the early 1960s. The number of people who say they never or rarely attend church when responding to surveys has grown from only a few percent of Americans in 1960 to twenty-five to forty percent, with the variation being dependent on such factors as geography, class position and income levels. Additionally, American society has become more liberal with regards to a wide variety of issues including race relations, gender roles, sexuality, and abortion. This social liberalization has coincided with an increased
secularization of public educational institutions. Even some religious denominations have followed the wider trend of liberalization by, for instance, accepting women and gays into the ranks of the clergy. Not surprisingly, this process of greater liberalization and secularization of society at large and greater liberalization within religious institutions themselves has produced a conservative backlash. Religious conservatives have become more politically active since the 1970s, and some religious people with more traditional
views have sought out more conservative denominations in response to the increased liberalism of their former denomination. All of this is well-known. It is also well-known that the “red states” tend on average to possess more devoutly religious people that the “blue states.”
However, there are problems with interpreting the “red/blue” conflict as purely religious in nature, though it may be tempting to do so from a surface look at the data. Class and geography are also important parts of the wider picture. For instance, lower-income people are much more likely to claim the importance of religion to their own lives, attend church, pray or engage in other religious practices regularly, or to describe themselves as “born-again” Christians. The class division between the religious and the non-religious is also greatest outside the “Bible Belt” of the southern states. These are fairly predictable statistics. What is more interesting is to observe the relationship
between income levels and church attendance within individual states. In the poor states, the higher one’s income, the likelihood of regular church attendance increases. In the richer states, the higher one’s income, the less likely one will be to attend church regularly. In other words, in poor “red” states, more affluent people are more likely toattend church than poor people, but in the wealthier “blue” states it is the other way around. (Gelman, 2008, pp. 83-84)
With regards to denominational affiliation, mainline Protestants have traditionally tended to vote Republican, but these have started to move away from consistent support for the Republicans as the party’s conservative wing has become dominant and the older Rockefeller-Eisenhower Republicans have been eclipsed. Catholics have traditionally supported the Democratic Party, but the Catholic vote has been less consistently Democratic as the party has become more liberal on social questions such as abortion and
gay rights. Prior to the 1980s, “evangelical,” conservative, or fundamentalist Protestants were primarily a Democratic constituency. Yet the evangelical vote has shifted by a wide margin to the Republicans since the liberalization of the Democratic Party and the advent of the “religious right.” (Gelman, 2008, p. 86)
What Does the Data Mean?
The red state/blue state divide and the division between religious and non-
religious voters did not appear until 1992. As Gelman, et.al. explain:
Part of the story is Bill Clinton, who repelled many religious conservatives who saw a connection between his adulterous lifestyle and his support for liberal social causes. (Reagan had been divorced, but that was long in the past, and he sided with the Religious Right on many issues.) There was also the growing strength of the evangelical movement as followers of Pat Robertson and other gained influence in state Republican parties…On the other side, Democrats became more committed to liberal positions on abortion and gay rights…With the closer alignment of moral issues to the political parties, voters have sorted themselves on these attitudes. (Gelman, 2008, p. 87-88)
Within this political framework and alignment of political parties with particular social causes and sets of cultural values, a voter who is both affluent and religious will unsurprisingly vote for the Republicans. A voter who is poor and religious could vote either Democratic or Republican. The data also shows that wealthy, non-religious people are about evenly divided between the two parties. In other words, support for the Republicans comes primarily from middle to upper class people who are also religious. Support for the Democrats comes from the non-religious and lower-class religious people. Contra the Marxist view of religion as the “opium of the masses” whereby the
working classes are distracted from pursuing their material interests because of religious or cultural values or biases, the evidence indicates that it is the affluent whose politics are most influenced by their cultural norms. Gelman, Park, Shor, Bafumi and Cortina offer this assessment of their research:
Voters consider cultural issues to be more important as they become more financially secure. From this perspective it makes perfect sense that politics is more about economics in poor states and more about culture in rich states. And it also makes sense that, among low-income voters, political attitudes are not much different in red or blue states, whereas the cultural divide of the two Americas looms larger at high incomes. For predicting your vote, we suspect that it’s not so important whether you buy life’s necessities at Wal-Mart or the corner grocery, but that it might be more telling if you spend your extra income on auto-racing tickets or on a daily gourmet coffee. We can understand differences between red and blue America in terms of cultural values of upper-middle-class and rich voters. Religious attendance is associated with Republican vote most strongly among high income residents of all states. This does not mean that lower-income Americans all vote the same way-far from it-but the differences in how they vote appear to depend less on religious values. (Gelman, 2008, pp. 89-92)
As an illustration, the data from the 2004 election demonstrates that the relationship between income and church attendance was a predictable indicator of how one would vote in heavily Democratic states, heavily Republican states and “battleground” states alike. In all three types of states, high income persons who attend church were likely to vote Republican, while in strongly Democratic states there was no demonstrable relationship between income and voting patterns.
Why Is the South Different?
The Southern states present two distinct anomalies. The first of these is Bartels observation that it is only in the South that the phenomenon of white voters lacking college education voting Republican emerges. (Bartels, 2006) Even so, it has been established that lower-income voters in the South overwhelmingly vote Democratic. What makes the South distinct is the proportionately high number of blue-collar whites who vote Republican, generally lower-middle class persons with annual earnings in the
$20,000-$40,000 range. Even more interesting is that prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic Party was so deeply entrenched and institutionalized in the South that the Southern states essentially comprised a one-party region. Indeed, the South was known as the “Solid South” in national electoral politics because the region’s Democratic loyalties were so predictable. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act that white
voters in the South began to drift towards the Republicans. These pieces of legislation had been passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed into law by the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. (Lamis, 2005)
This explains the shift of the South to the Republicans generally but what about working class whites in the South? It was this class of whites that proved to be the most resistant to civil rights in the South. Upper-income whites were more accommodating to the institutionalization of civil rights, as it was these whites who stood to gain the most from the economic transformation of the South during the postwar era from a predominately agricultural society to a modern industrial society, which necessitated at
least some degree of social modernization as well. Furthermore, upper-income whites were more able to insulate themselves from the perceived “negative” effects of civil rights, such as racially integrated public spaces and institutions (schools, parks, pools, golf courses, theaters, etc.) Many of these whites simply formed private schools and recreational associations for themselves that remained de facto segregated, and often resided in neighborhoods where the price of housing was cost prohibitive for blacks. In
other words, upper class whites could enjoy the economic and political benefits of public desegregation while essentially retaining segregation for themselves on a private basis.
This was not true of the white working class. Urban working class whites
whose resistance to desegregation failed would then relocate to racially homogenous white neighborhoods in suburban areas outside of cities. Hence, the well-known pattern of “white flight.” These patterns of a shift from public segregation to private segregation by upper-income whites and white flight by working class whites tended to push Southern whites in general towards fiscal conservatism. Simply put, these whites did not want to pay taxes to support public institutions and facilities that they regarded as having been “handed over” to blacks. (Kruse, 2005) Consequently, fiscal and economic conservatives associated with the Republican Party in the Northern states began to regard de jure or de facto “racial conservatives” in the South as their natural allies and the two forces began to bend towards one another. (Lewis, 2006) Over time, the openly racial dimension of this phenomenon would fade into a middle-class oriented fiscal conservatism that emphasized “color blindness.” It would be an overstatement to claim that contemporary working class Southern whites who vote Republican in the name of fiscal and economic conservatism are simply closet racists who hide their real views
behind something more socially acceptable. Indeed, many of them may well be unaware of the origins of this particular brand of conservatism, and some of these contemporary Southern white conservative Republicans are transplanted Northerners (or their descendents) who had little or no personal exposure to the old system of segregation, but the roots of contemporary Southern white working class political conservatism in resistance to civil rights is a demonstrable fact. (Lassiter, 2004; Hall, 2005)
The other anomaly to be found in the South is the greater attachment of upper-income persons to organized religion over lower-income persons. This phenomenon defies the usual pattern not only in the United States, but world wide. In most societies, the higher one’s class position, the less likely one will be to practice formal religion. The American South reverses this pattern. Thus far, it does not appear that enough research has been done on this situation to make a thorough understanding of its origins or causes available. One possibility may be the fact that the South was for all practical purposes a
feudal society with a rigid racial caste system and a primarily agrarian economy until the post-World War Two era. The use of religion as a means of social control by the traditional Southern white ruling class is well-known. For instance, each of the major U.S. Protestant denominations split into northern and southern factions over the issue of slavery prior to the Civil War. Hence, the existence of such contemporary denominations as the Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists. White fundamentalist preachers were
often defenders of the segregationist status quo during the civil rights era as well.
If indeed religion was used as a force for social control, it is understandable that a tradition of greater than usual attachment to religious institutions would develop among privileged Southern whites. Likewise, it would certainly be understandable that lower-class persons would experience greater alienation from religious institutions in such a situation, leading to an inversion of the usual norm where it is the lower classes that are more religiously devout than the upper classes. Similar situations have emerged in other nations. For instance, the radical labor and peasant movements in Spain during the pre-
Franco years included many otherwise culturally conservative persons who developed a militant anti-clericalism in response to the role of the Catholic Church in Spain as accomplices to a highly oppressive ruling class. (Bookchin, 2001)
The American South displays characteristics concerning the relationship between personal religiosity, class position and political affiliation that are in some ways similar to what is often found in Latin American countries. The American South is also more similar in its history to Latin America than other regions of North America. Both the South and most of Latin America have a feudal or quasi-feudal past as agrarian societies with a rigid class structure with organized religious institutions being very much on the side of the ruling class. In Latin America, the lower-classes tend to be very religious on a
personal level, while formal displays of religious piety through such things as regular church attendance are more common to the middle classes. The upper layers of the Church hierarchy in Latin America tend to be very conservative. Voting patterns in Latin American countries are such that the lower classes typically vote for the Left, while the middle classes will vote for the center-right Christian Democratic parties, and the upper classes will vote for the “hard Right.” (Yglesias, 2007) This fairly closely mirrors class voting patterns in the southern states in the U.S. It is also true that evangelical religion in Latin America takes on different forms depending on the class position of the participants. Middle to upper class Latin American evangelicals will often
espouse social or political views similar to those of the U.S. “Religious Right.” The Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt was an example of this. On the other hand, lower class evangelicalism in Latin America tends to take on a “social gospel” flavor much like African-American religion in America or past expressions of left-wing evangelicalism that emerged in American populism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. (Freston, 2008) The American South and Latin America are similar to one another in unique ways in that both regions have both a fairly recent quasi-feudal, agrarian past and democratic governments. This would set both regions apart from the rest of North America, Europe, Asia, Africa or the Middle East. There appears to be unique and similar dynamics working in both regions that give these two regions characteristics that are difficult to find elsewhere.
The Big Sort
Still another factor affecting voting patterns in American elections is what author Bill Bishop has called “The Big Sort.” This is a phenomenon where persons with the financial means of doing so will relocate to a neighborhood, community or even a state that is more compatible with their cultural interests. This creates a system of cultural self-segregation among middle to upper income Americans.(Bishop, 2008) To demonstrate his argument, Bishop acknowledges that in the 1976 Ford-Carter election, the number of counties in the United States where either candidate won by a landslide (a margin of
twenty percentage points or greater) was significantly fewer in number than the number of counties where victory was determined by a landslide in the Bush-Kerry election of 2004. Bishop also describes his experience of living in a liberal enclave in the Austin, Texas area:
My wife and I…didn’t intend to move into a community filled with Democrats, but that’s what we did-effortlessly and without a trace of understanding about what we were doing…In 2000, George W. Bush…took sixty percent of the state’s vote. But in our patch of Austin, Bush came in third, behind both Al Gore and Ralph Nader. Four years later, eight out of ten of our neighbors voted for John Kerry. (Bishop, 2008, p. 1)
Like other observers of these issues, Bishop traces the beginnings of the “big sort” to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent backlash from social conservatives and religious traditionalists. However, Bishop maintains that the sorting process really did not begin to manifest itself until the 1990s. During that decade, the baby boom generation, the first to be heavily influenced by the 1960s-era “cultural revolution,” entered middle age. The economic expansion of the 1990s and the growth of the educated population converged to create a situation where large numbers of persons
existed who possessed a combination of affluence, education and a relatively liberal social outlook. Consequently, both middle aged baby boomers and their younger, “Generation X” cohorts began to congregate in urban centers “where they would not be bound by old ideas or tight social ties.” (Bishop, 2008, p. 144)
It is also important to recognize that the “big sort” occurs primarily at the level of local communities, and sometimes individual neighborhoods, rather than at the state level. John Tierney observes that in the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush received the smallest numbers of votes in the states of Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii. However, all of these states had Republican governors at the time. Tierney believes such patterns indicate that the “red state/blue state” divide is a myth, and that most Americans are centrists. (Tierney, 2005) Jonathan Kandel observes that in the 2000 election, there were only five red states
(Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah, Nebraska and Idaho) and one blue state (Rhode Island) where the candidate of either party won by more than sixty percent. Kandel also observes that of the eleven states that passed initiatives prohibiting same-sex marriage in 2004, two of these states (Oregon and Michigan) went for the Democrats in the presidential election, and many others were competitive in that neither party won the presidency by more than sixty percent. (Kandel, 2006)
Bruce Oppenheimer argues that the division between red and blue states
represents divisions between Congressional districts rather than states, and he attributes this to partisan redistricting, which groups together voters with similar views and partisan sympathies and has the effect of creating “safe” districts for incumbents or their parties. (Oppenheimer, 2005) Yet the most compelling evidence is that offered by Bishop. According to Bishop, in 1976 only twenty-six percent of Americans lived in what he calls “landslide counties” where the presidential vote is determined by more than a sixty
percent total for the winner. By 1992, the year that Gelman and associates consider to be the starting point for the “red/blue” divide, thirty-eight percent of voters resided in landslide counties. That percentage increased with each subsequent presidential election, and by 2004, forty-eight percent of Americans were living in landslide counties. (Bishop, 2008, pp. 9-10)
The 2008 Presidential Election
Bishop has updated his research to include the 2008 presidential election. In
2008, the number of Americans living in landslide counties was the same as in 2004: forty-eight percent. This division has tilted strongly towards the Democrats. In 2004, 94 million lived in Democratic landslide counties, while in 2008 it was only 64 million. In 2008, 53 million Americans were in Republican landslide counties, while in 2004 it had been 83 million. Among states, the average winning margin was seventeen percent, as opposed to sixteen percent in 2004, fifteen percent in 2000, and ten percent in 1976. The
number of landslide states increased to thirty-six from twenty-nine in 2004. The number of states where the election was decided by five or less percentage points was down to seven, from eleven in 2004. Barack Obama won forty-three percent of the rural vote, up from Kerry’s forty percent in 2004, and fifty-seven percent of the urban vote, up from Kerry’s fifty-one percent. Bishop attributes Obama’s greater vote totals in rural America
over Kerry to the success of his strategy of targeting college towns within rural areas. Also, the 2008 election demonstrated strong divisions among racial and ethnic groups. In those counties where Obama won by a landslide, only 1.3 whites can be found for every minority. Yet in McCain-landslide counties, there are five whites for every minority. (Bishop, 2008)
The Future
The most striking feature of the 2008 election is the fact that while the number of landslide counties remained the same, on a partisan basis the number of persons living in a landslide county increased by a third for Democrats and decreased by about the same amount for Republicans. Bishop attributes this to a higher out-migration rate among Democrats, who relocate to traditionally “red” areas but bring “blue” values with them, and consequently influence voting patterns in their new localities accordingly. (Bishop, 2008) However, such a shift in a four year period might also be attributed to much more far reaching demographic, cultural and generational change. In 1997, the conservative writer Peter Brimelow made this prediction:
The Republican hour is rapidly drawing to a close. Not because the (Republican base) of the West and the South, of the middle class and urban blue-collar voters, is breaking up in the traditional manner. Instead, it is being drowned—as a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act…Nine-tenths of the immigrant influx is from groups with significant—sometimes overwhelming—Democratic propensities. After thirty years, their numbers are reaching critical mass. And there is no end in sight.
To estimate the future impact of Immigration, we took the 1988 presidential race, in which George Bush beat Michael Dukakis with 53 per cent of the vote. This figure happens also to be the average vote received by the Republicans in presidential elections since 1968—the largest advantage won by any party over any six elections in American history. And it is the vote received by Republicans in 1994, when they took control of the Senate and House. It can reasonably be regarded as the Republican high-water mark.
Then we lowered this high-water mark by accounting for the shifting ethnic balance that the Census projects will result from immigration, assuming that the ethnic groups continued to vote as they did in 1988. The results are startling…Even if the Republicans can again win their 1988 level of support in each ethnic group—which they have miserably failed to do against Bill Clinton—they have at most two presidential cycles left. Then they go inexorably into minority status, beginning in 2008. (Brimelow, 1997)
Subsequent events since the publication of Brimelow’s article in 1997 would seem to vindicate his prognosis. Another work making a similar prediction was published by two writers associated with The New Republic in 2002. In their The Emerging Democratic Majority, authors John P. Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted the rise of a new electoral majority rooted in educated urban professionals, racial and ethnic minorities, feminists and educated working women, college students, environmentalists, secularists, gays and
lesbians. Judis and Teixeira refer to this phenomenon as “George McGovern’s Revenge” as these were largely the groups that comprised the 1972 McGovern coalition that lost in a landslide to President Nixon.
However, there is another constituent group among Judis and Teixeira’s predicted Democratic majority: the white working class. Observing how the Democratic Party lost substantial numbers of blue collar white voters during the post-civil rights era over race issues, foreign policy, crime, the rise of the counterculture and the conservative religious backlash, gun control and the economic downturn of the 1970s, Judis and Teixeira argued that these voters began to return to the Democrats because of the recession that occurred
in the early 1990s during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. In other words, blue collar whites were returning to the Democrats at precisely the same time as the emergence of the red state/blue state electoral divide. President Reagan won the votes of unionized white workers in 1980 and 1984. George H. W. Bush lost these voters by four percentage points in 1988. Clinton won the white unionized worker vote by an average of twenty-three percentage points in 1992 and 1996. Yet, it is during these years
that the current electoral divide emerges, so clearly the conventional view offered by Thomas Frank and others of “working class Republicans versus upper class Democrats” is false and likely rooted in outdated stereotypes left over from the Nixon and Reagan eras. Indeed, Judis and Teixeira point out that the composition of the “white working class” has changed significantly, with nearly fifty percent of white workers being women by 2000, and a significant number of younger, urban white workers with relatively liberal
views on social issues like abortion, the environment or gay rights. Like Brimelow, Judis and Teixeira predicted that 2008 would be the year that the new Democratic majority eventually became dominant. (Judis and Teixeira, 2002, p. 14, 37-66)
Gelman and associates demonstrate rather clearly that the primary driving force in the red state/blue state “culture war” is religion. The primary indicator of whether a middle class person will vote Democratic or Republican is whether they attend church regularly or not. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, nearly all American religious denominations have lost members over the last twenty years. Catholics and Baptists, the two largest denominations, lost one and four percent of their membership, respectively. The number of people claiming the generic label of “Christian” has dropped by half a percentage point. Mainline Protestant denominations
have lost nearly a third of their membership since 1990. Persons claiming no religion at all and persons with agnostic views of religion have both doubled in the past twenty years, and collectively, skeptics, atheists, agnostics and other unbelievers are the single largest religious group in the U.S. at twenty percent, except for Catholics with twenty-five percent.
Adherents of the Jewish religion have decreased by one third. Fringe
Protestant denominations like the Pentecostals, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists have either remained the same numerically or increased slightly, but these are still very small when compared to American society as a whole. The only religions that have experienced real growth in the past twenty years have been those from outside traditional American culture. The number of U.S. Muslims and adherents of
“Eastern” religions like Buddhism or Hinduism have doubled, largely due to
immigration, and adherents of so-called “new age” spiritualities, neo-paganism, and Wicca have grown by one third. (Grossman, 2009)
Summary and Conclusion
It has been demonstrated that the popular view of the red-state/blue-state “culture war” divide as one pitting working class conservatives against affluent liberals is false. This view is rooted in archaic stereotypes that have not been especially relevant to U.S. electoral politics since the “red-state/blue-state” dichotomy has emerged. Specifically, the defection of white working class voters to the Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s has since reversed itself. The only region of the United States where the blue collar class votes Republican in any significant numbers is in the South, and this is due to that
region’s unique history in matters of race, religion and economics. The present-day red-state/blue-state divide first begins to appear on the electoral map in the 1992 presidential election, precisely the time that blue collar whites were returning to the Democrats.
Nor is this divide a matter of “rich versus poor.” The United States is indeed
polarized along class lines, but this economic polarization takes places on a national rather than sectional basis. As the overall pattern of wealth and income distribution in the U.S. has become more uneven in recent decades, support for the Democratic Party among working class voters has actually increased. Instead, the “red/blue” conflict represents an intra-class conflict within the middle class, primarily the upper middle class, with middle
class voters in wealthy states being more culturally liberal than their counterparts in poorer states. The driving force behind this middle class culture war is religion, with church attendance being the primary indication of how a middle class person will vote. Geographically, this cultural polarization transpires more at the local community level rather than at the state level, pitting rural versus urban areas and conservative neighborhoods against liberal ones, though differences among states are not insignificant.
The most compelling piece of evidence to support the argument that the
“red/blue” conflict represents an intra-class divide within the affluent middle-class is the fact that electoral maps show that the “poor vote” overwhelmingly goes to Democrats while the “rich vote” overwhelmingly goes to Republicans, and the middle-class vote breaks down geographically on the standard “red/blue” pattern. This divide plays out on a geographical basis to the degree that it does because of the effects of Bill Bishop’s “Big Sort” whereby middle class persons possess the means of self-segregation along cultural,
religious and ideological lines, and this system of self-segregation occurs primarily on a local rather than state level. The evidence to support this localized geographical divide consists primarily of the wide margins by which a political party will often win in a specific locality. In each of the last two presidential elections, one of the parties beat the other by a margin of more than twenty percentage points in forty-eight percent of all American counties. The gaps at the state level tend to be smaller. In the 2008 election, the
overall pattern of “red/blue” division among middle and upper-middle income voters continued. The number of “blue” states increased, while the number of counties exhibiting an electoral polarization wider than twenty percentage points remained the same. This is apparently due to two principal factors: a greater out-migration rate from blue areas to red areas rather than vice versa, and demographic, cultural and generational change that indicates the population groups that are inclined to vote Republican are shrinking, while those inclined to vote Democratic are increasing.
Furthermore, it can be predicted with relative safety that, barring completely
unforeseen circumstances, the “liberal” side will be the winning side in the “culture war” and the Democratic Party will likely be the dominant party in U.S. politics for the foreseeable future. This is due to a combination of the aforementioned generational, cultural and demographic changes, large scale immigration, economic downturn, an increased number of educated urban professionals, changing gender roles that include expanding roles for women, and declining interest in traditional religious beliefs, practices or denominational affiliation. This does not mean that “social conservatives” or
the Republican Party will disappear, far from it, but it does mean that the political Right is less likely to be as influential in the foreseeable future as it has been in the recent past.
Bibliography:
Abramowitz, Alan and Kyle L. Saunders (2005). Why We Can’t We All Just Get Along?: The Reality of a Polarized America. The Forum, Berkeley Electronic Press.
Bartels, Larry M. (2008). Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton University Press.
Bartels, Larry M. (2006). “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Journal of Political Science Quarterly, 2006, 1, 201-226.
Bill Bishop, (2008). No, We Didn’t: America Hasn’t Changed As Much as Tuesday’s Results Would Indicate. Salon, November 10, 2008.
Bishop, Bill and Robert G. Cushing (2008). The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Bookchin, Murray (2001). The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936. London: AK Press.
Brimelow, Peter and Edward S. Rubenstein (1997). Electing a New People. National Review, June 16, 1997.
Brooks, David (2001). One Nation, Slightly Divisible. The Atlantic Monthly, December 2001.
Fiorina, Morris P. with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope. (2004). Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. Longman.
Florida, Richard (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class, And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life. Basic Books.
Frank, Thomas (2004). What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Freston, Paul (2008). Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America. Oxford University Press.
Gelman, Andrew and David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, Jeronimo Cortina (2008). Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Grossman, Cathy Lynn (2009). Most Religious Groups in USA Have Lost Ground, Survey Finds. USA Today, March 17, 2009.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd (2005). The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past. Journal of American History 91: 1233-1263
Hunter, James Davison (2005). Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Making Sense of the Battles Over the Family, Art, Education, Law and Politics. Second Edition. Basic Books.
Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris (2005). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge University Press.
Judis, John and Ruy Teixeira (2002). The Emerging Democratic Majority. New York: Scribner.
Kandel, Jonathan (2006). The Myth of the Red State/Blue State Divide. Archived at http://www.politicsandgovernment.ilstu.edu/downloads/icsps_papers/2006/JonathanKandel1.pdf.
Kimball, David C. and Cassie A. Gross (2005). “The Growing Polarization of American Voters,” Presented at The State of the Parties: 2004 and Beyond conference, Akron, OH, October 6, 2005.
Kruse, Kevin M. (2005, July). The Politics of Race and Public Space: Desegregation, Privatization, and the Tax Revolt in Atlanta. Journal of Urban History: 610-633
Lamis, Alexander (2005). The Emergence of a Two-Party System: Southern Politics in the Twentieth Century. The American South in the Twentieth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Lassiter, Matthew D. (2004). The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind” Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis. Journal of Urban History 30: 549-582
Lewis, George (2006, February). Virginia’s Northern Strategy: Southern Segregationists and the Route to National Conservatism. Journal of Southern History, 72:111-146.
McCarty, Nolan with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (2006). Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Boston: MIT Press.
Oppenheimer, Bruce (2005). Deep Red and Blue Congressional Districts: The Causes and Consequences of Declining Party Competitiveness. In Larry Dodd (Ed.), Congress Reconsidered, 8th edition. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
Stonecash, Jeffrey (2005). Scaring the Democrats: What’s the Matter with Thomas Frank’s Argument? The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2005.
Tierney, John. (2004). A Nation Divided? Who Says?. The Nation: On Message, June 13, 2004. Sec. 4, Col. 1.
Yglesias, Matthew (2007). Religion and Income. The Atlantic. November 11, 2007.
Copyright 2009. Keith Preston. All rights reserved.
