Polls and Elections: What's the Matter with the White Working Class? The Effects of Union Membership in the 2004 Presidential Election

Presidential Studies Quarterly › Vol. 40 Nbr. 1, March 2010

Author: Francia, Peter L

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Summary

Thomas Frank asserts that the Republican Party built a winning coalition in recent elections by convincing white working-class voters to cast their ballots on the basis of cultural wedge issues. Larry Bartels, conversely, argues that economic issues remain paramount to white working-class voters. The authors contend that the white working class is a more diverse bloc than both Frank's and Bartels's analyses suggest. Using data from the 2004 National Election Pool, their results show that there are significant political differences between white working-class voters in union households and those in nonunion households.

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Extract

Polls and Elections: What's the Matter with the White Working Class? The Effects of Union Membership in the 2004 Presidential Election

Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? sparked a lively academic debate about the political attitudes and voting behavior of the white working class. Frank writes of a "Great Backlash" in which the white working class, once a pillar of the New Deal coalition, left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party as conservatism shifted away from its early emphasis on "fiscal sobriety" toward a more recent emphasis on "explosive social issues" such as abortion and gun control (2004, 8). This argument follows on the work of several other scholars and political observers who also have argued that social and cultural wedge issues alienated white working-class voters from the Democratic Party (Cook 2008; Edsall and Edsall 1991; Freedman 1996; Huckfeldt and Kohfeld 1989; Judis and Teixeira 2002; Ladd and Hadley 1975; Phillips 1969; Rieder 1989).

However, Larry Barrels, in his provocative article "What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?" (and later his 2008 book Unequal Democracy), challenges the premise that white working-class voters are preoccupied with social issues, and that they shifted their allegiance to the Republican Party (see also Brewer and Stonecash 2001, 2007; Stonecash 2005). Barrels finds that Republicans have made their most significant gains with middleand upper-income voters since the 1950s, and that any major losses of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party have come primarily in the South (2006, 209-11). He further notes that cultural wedge issues were not a high priority to most white working-class voters in 2004, and concludes that the "statistical analysis continues to demonstrate that material economic concerns rather than cultural wedge issues were of primary importance to Frank's working-class white voters" (2006, 218).

The starkly different descriptions that Frank and Barrels offer of the white working class point to the need for some added clarity on this subject. In this study, we contend that both analyses overlook the criti...

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