What’s the Matter With Poor Voters? A Reconsideration
18th August 2013
Steven Hayward is not afraid to ask some pretty obvious questions.
The great but frustrated hope of liberals is that people will vote their supposed class interest, that is, that people of modest incomes will vote for higher taxes (on others) and bigger government. It is a matter of frustration for liberals when the working class doesn’t vote for Democrats: see Thomas Frank’s famous What’s the Matter With Kansas? (Actually, don’t see it; it’s stupid; one can just as easily ask, What’s the Matter With the Upper West Side?, where rich liberals vote for candidates who want to raise their income taxes. Voting against economic self-interest on the Upper West Side is taken as a sign of enlightenment rather than the interest-denying stupidity that is attributed to the GOP-voting working classes of the red states.)
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I was recalling over the weekend for an audience of mostly liberals the moment that George McGovern realized he was going to lose his Senate seat in the 1980 election: he was in a supermarket checkout line in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where two women in line ahead of him told him that although they were lifelong Democrats, they weren’t going to vote for him this time because he was “too liberal.” They then proceeded to purchase their groceries with food stamps.