Reading “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State” by Andrew Gelman, et al. (2008)
Though this book is more than fifteen years old, it seemed like an appropriate choice from the Editor’s Reading List, considering the divisive nature of our current election-year politics and considering that my last selection was Southern Politics in the 1990s. This one, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, takes a distinctly different but still important look at the subsequent decade: the 2000s. Readers over 40 will recall the Bush-Gore election; decided by 537 votes in Florida, this episode in our political history was built upon the division in the 1990s, stoked by anti-Clinton sentiments and the rhetoric of partisans like Newt Gingrich. Though this book is not specifically about the South, it is more than pertinent to an examination of the region’s beliefs, myths, and narratives.
In chapter one, “The Paradox,” Gelman explains something that he will come back to over and over throughout the book: poorer states are more likely to lean Republican than richer states, while poorer people are more likely to lean Democratic than richer people. What this has meant, historically, is that voting patterns have blended people together geographically and politically. Then, the post-Civil Rights shake-up of the Democratic Party meant that two truly divergent and obviously different political parties emerged. Before the Civil Rights movement, when the Democratic Party was a very complex entity, Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed in the late 1800s, President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s, and Governor George Wallace in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s were all parts of this party’s tradition. After the Democrats alienated race-focused Southern whites with a pro-integration stance and alienated socially conservative voters with liberal positions on gay rights, immigration, and welfare programs, American voters had a much starker choice in the two parties. No more mixing-and-matching and compromising within the parties— it’s become more of an either-or choice. But that still doesn’t mean that it’s simple. Gelman writes:
This book was ultimately motivated by frustration at media images of rich, yuppie Democrats and lower-income, middle-American Republicans- archetypes that ring true, at some level, but are contradicted in the aggregate. [ . . . ] The perception of polarization is itself part of polarization, and views about whom the candidates represent can affect how political decisions are reported.
To end his short opening chapter, Gelman echoes something that conservative thinker and pundit Kevin Phillips stated more than fifty years ago: “voters [are] searching for a party that feels like home.”
Chapter 2, “Rich State, Poor State,” starts at the opening of the new millennium, with the Bush-Gore election of 2000. In this election, “Bush won the fifteen poorest states, starting with nearly 60% on the vote in Mississippi, the poorest state.” That’s the state-level view. By contrast, among the people, Bush’s strongest support was among “voters making over $200,000” and lowest among “voters making less than $15,000.” This is why Gelman calls it “The Paradox” in the previous chapter. Wouldn’t poor states be made up of poor people, and thus poor voters? Sort of, yes, but there are more things to consider. One is that not every person is a registered voter or an active voter; the other is that household income is not the only factor that determines the way people vote. Gelman writes, “Throughout the twentieth century and even before, the Democratic Party in the United States has been considered the party of the lower classes and the average person.” Yet, in the post-Civil Rights shift, the Democrats showing favor to social welfare programs and to racial minorities led many Americans to conflate these to be connected, or even to mean the same thing. Where the Democrats had once been regarded as the party of hard-working people, a new image emerged: the party of handouts. And, as Gelman puts it, “How you vote is partly a matter of what kind of person you see yourself as and who you want to identify with.” In the South, especially, people who identify themselves as hard-working do not want to be associated with people who they identify as not hard-working.
Chapter 3 then considers a notion we’ve all wondered about one time or another: “How the Talking Heads Can Be So Confused.” The media, including the news media, have become even more important since Gelman’s book was published, and he asks a particularly relevant question in the first section: “Why Do We Care What Journalists Say?” One problem, he cites, is that the “image of the typical Democrat” can range from a working-class union member to a “Starbucks-sipping yuppie,” while a typical Republican can be imagined as anything from a “religious Wal-Mart shopper [to] a smug banker.” Journalists, then, are left to speak to us in terms we understand, like relating political ideals to income level or consumption habits, which asks us to stereotype in order to understand. This could be attributed to “availability bias,” our tendency to make large decisions using small amounts of information. Moreover, about the charge that the news media is biased and liberal, one reason may be that many national news outlets and their employees live and work in affluent, urban, and generally liberal areas of the country. In short, journalists might seem “liberal” because they are well-educated, affluent, cosmopolitan, and inquisitive, rather than working-class, rural, provincial and conservative-minded. The habits described here may be attributable to people everywhere, but they are also particularly Southern: wanting to profess an expansive worldview that is built upon rather provincial life experience, while dubbing those who express ideas we haven’t encountered in daily life as being out of touch with how life actually works.
That ends Part I, and in Part II, titled “What’s Going On,” Gelman moves into historical patterns related to income and voting. He remarks early on that, no matter the region, income and voting habits has been clearly correlated since 1980. This would explain the tendency of Georgia and North Carolina, among Southern states, to come out for Democrats more often than, say, Mississippi or South Carolina. After VO Key’s similar findings in the 1930s and ’40s, Gelman raises the issue of income inequality, which has been steadily rising since the 1970s. This trend has also pushed people further and further apart when it comes to which political party they support. We read:
The poor people in most Republican-leaning states tend to be Democrats; the rich people in most Democratic-leaning states tend to be Republicans. Income matters, but context — geography — also matters. Individual income is a positive predictor and state average income is a negative predictor of Republican voting.
And at this end of the chapter, there’s this:
Exit polls for the 2006 congressional elections showed that the Republicans do best in the South and among high-income voters, with the pattern of income being strongest in the South and weakest in the Democratic-leaning West and Northeast.
Which brings us to the issue of inequality in chapter 5, and we’ve got a few things going on. One is that the poorest states — most of which are in the South — have had considerable increases in income and improvements in quality of life. While it was common in our past to see situations like the ones depicted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Have You Seen Their Faces, it is no longer common to see people living in such terrible poverty. Another issue is that the affluent in wealthier states are more willing to increase their taxes to support the general welfare and public services, whereas the affluent in poorer states are less willing to do the same. Third, a look at county-level voting habits reveals that state-level election results are often not indicative of the nuances from locality to locality. This is particularly true in my home state of Alabama, where the middle cross-section of the state, the Black Belt, is reliably Democratic (“blue”) while the upper and lower thirds are equally reliable Republican (“red”) strongholds. And Gelman says this same thing himself: “In most southern states, rich counties voted for Republicans in the past and continue to do so.” The wealthy counties around Mobile and Birmingham are among the reddest you’ll find anywhere.
Then, in the latter pages of chapter 5, the elephant in the room comes out into full view: race. In the section, “Blacks and Whites, North and South,” the first thing we read is a block quote from Thomas and Mary Edsall writing in 1991, stating that “instead of being seen as advancing the economic well-being of all voters,” Democrats’ social programs and emphasis on racial equality are often seen as “promoting the establishment of new rights and government guarantees” for minority groups. Here, a discussion of the South is unavoidable, as the majority of nation’s black population lives in the region. Gelman alludes briefly to the one-man, one-vote rulings in Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, which led to a new kind of apportionment for representative bodies, like state legislatures and Congress. In the South, that meant big changes, since the previous methods for determining representation favored rural voters, who are generally fewer in number and more conservative. Also, the post-Civil Rights changes meant that more poor blacks could vote, and this infusion of new voters with previously ignored needs began coming to the polls.
In his sixth chapter, Gelman throws another ingredient into this complex stew: religion. Here, he writes that religion is not a new force in American politics, but “what is new is the link between religion and the Republican Party.” This matters because, in a time when church attendance is declining, there is a split worth noting: “social conservatives have tended to go to church more often, while liberals have reduced their church attendance.” What does this have to do with the South? In the our region, church attendance rates are generally higher, and religion — Protestant Christianity, in particular — is a strong social force for many people, because it is prevalent in their families and communities. Gelman notes this: “the most religious states are relatively poor [ . . . ] and in the South.” And though “Americans vastly overreport their churchgoing,” people in Southern states really do go more often than people in other parts of the country. Beyond that, we have the rise of the Religious Right, an organized and often-polemical political force that connects religion and politics for many people. This political mechanism opposes abortion and gay rights, and when we connect those ideals about society with previously mentioned notions of work, handouts, and race . . . a microcosm with its very own echo chamber results. And that microcosm coalesced in the 1990s as politically liberal causes grew stronger. (It didn’t help matters any that Democrat Bill Clinton was reputed to have had multiple extramarital affairs.) Tying in another factor previously mentioned — the decline in severe poverty — Gelman cites postmaterialist scholar Ronald Inglehardt, who has noted that “voters consider cultural issues to be more important as they become more financially secure.” When people aren’t starving, they can think about other things, and that has altered the Southern electorate in recent decades.
For my purposes, looking at the South since 1970, I’ll skip chapter 7, which presents a portrait of the United States as compared to other countries around the world.
Moving on then to chapter 8, which opens Part III, we have “polarized parties.” Right off the bat, Gelman says what we’re all thinking, that it’s hard to get along with people around us when they not only vote differently but understand life differently. Yet, he notes, the benefit of polarization is that if makes “party brand names meaningful.” To get more specific, we learn about three types of polarization: partisan polarization, opinion radicalization, and issue alignment. The first is what it sounds like- your party versus my party. The second is when someone takes a political issue and goes to the extreme with it. The last is when people group themselves not within party identification but around a certain belief, like the pro-life movement. An issue that combines the first and third ones is the economy, which people tend to form opinions about based on their circumstances. Gelman explains that people tend to convince themselves that the economy is good when their own party is in power and that it’s bad when the other party is in power. We also get a Southern spin on this polarization with some of Gelman’s examples. He shares two separate examples: first, when about half of respondents in three Southern states believed that 9/11 was God punishing the US for being a sinful nation, and second, when more than half of Mississippians believed that AIDS was God’s punishment on homosexuals. For the latter issue, only 16% of people in Rhode Island believed the same thing. Ultimately, what may be most distressing about these tendencies is the irrelevance of facts. Although the Democratic Party really has gotten more liberal since the 1970s and although the Republicans really have gotten more conservative since the 1970s, most voters don’t make their choices based on facts about the past; they make their choices based on a vague sense of things that is often inaccurate . . . i.e. myths.
In the next-to-last chapter, we read about the potential for coalition-building among these disparate forces. Remembering that Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is not a book specifically about the South, one truth about the modern South shines through, and Gelman points it out. The Democratic Party has to decide what they will do with and in the South. Do they move to the center on social issues and try to win over Southern moderates, or do accept that the South belongs to the Republicans and focus on other areas? Certainly, there are places in the South where gains could be made, like the independent-minded parts of Appalachia or black-majority portions of the Deep South. But it could it yield meaningful change in election results? Maybe. The challenge for the Democrats is to dispel the notion that they are only the party of Northern urban professionals, non-white people who want handouts, non-English-speaking immigrants, and people in the LGBTQ community. Thinking about the South, it would be hard to build a winning coalition with only these groups-but what would the planks in such a platform even be? There are solid, real-life reasons — right or wrong — that the Democrats lost the South between the 1970s and the 2000s. The question is: do the Republicans have an unflappable degree of control, or could something — or some things — shake it up?
In the final chapter, “Putting It All Together,” Gelman gives his summation. He has already proven his point, that voters are not as easily categorized as one might assume from watching the nightly news. There aren’t just two kinds of people in the US: ones in this party who all believe these things, and ones in the other party who all believe the opposite. No, not quite. All in Gelman re-establishes what he said to begin with. The things that appear to be true in general are not necessarily true in specific.
As the editor of a project about the belief, myths, and narratives that have shaped the South since 1970, I chose to include Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State because it examines the South in the light of national trends and factors. While a book like John Shelton Reed’s takes a statistical approach to Southern culture specifically, Gelman’s work takes the South as one among many political entities within a larger framework. Certainly the South supported George Wallace and Jesse Helms — homegrown Southerners — but we also have supported Ronald Reagan and now Donald Trump, who are both about as un-Southern as you can get. This book also exposes an uncomfortable truth in its comparisons: the fact that affluent people in wealthy states are more willing to support the public good, while affluent people in poor states are less willing to do that. Interesting, because data shows that Southerners go to church more than other Americans, but many are also less willing to take care of people who have very little, instead regarding them as lazy and wanting a handout. For now, though, most of the South is reliably “red” with two of the wealthier states, Georgia and North Carolina, wavering back and forth, turning blue from time to time. In recent years, Virginia and Kentucky have teetered a bit too, while other states, like Texas and Alabama, have just gotten redder. My hope is not for this party or that one to control politics; I believe that division is bad for all of us. My hope is for a strong two-party presence that results in competitive elections and for good public policy that emerges from compromises between parties with opposing visions. I believe that that’s when we will see the best of what the South can be.
Watch Andrew Gelman discuss his book on C-SPAN:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?281097-1/red-state-blue-state-rich-state-poor-state
Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on May 9, 2024.
