When Red States Get Blue: What's the Matter with Connecticut? (Trends) (Former Republican States)

In What's the Matter With Kansas? Thomas Frank sought to explain why blue-collar voters abandoned their longtime home in the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt for the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. Frank complained that they had been deceived into voting their class resentments rather than their economic interests. Relying on "wedge" social issues such as abortion, welfare, and guns, Republicans persuaded heartland voters that the Democratic Party was run by liberals who detested family values and regarded the people who held them as backward. Voters in the poorest parts of America thus came to support a GOP whose words evoked traditional morality but whose policies mainly benefited Wall Street. Whatever the virtues of Frank's explanation, there can be no doubt that this shift has occurred. But an equally dramatic change has come to the Blue States of the Northeast, once Republican bastions turned solidly Democratic. Highly educated and affluent voters whose parents or grandparents were stalwarts of the GOP now seemingly vote against their own economic interests by favoring Democratic candidates.