In the book What's the Matter With Kansas? Thomas Frank sets out to answer a paradox: why the poorest county in America, which is located in the Great Plains "a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns," gave an overwhelming 80 percent of their votes for Republican candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 election (p. 1). How can economically depressed towns and counties vote for the Republican Party, which has a long and storied tradition of favoring the rich over the poor with their policies, rather than the Democratic Party which has historically supported the working class and the poor? Or, to put it more simply, "How could so many people get it so wrong?" (p. 1). According to Frank, the answer is that they have been manipulated by the Republican Party, whipped into an indignant moral frenzy in order to get them to vote against their economic interests. Frank's book presents a passionate analysis of his home state, but at times it veers into the very same marshy rhetorical grounds that he accuses the Republicans of living in. This paper will present Frank's central arguments and conclude with an analysis of his main points. What we will find is that Frank's book, while flawed, does put its finger on the root causes of the red state blue state divide.
Frank begins the book by exploring the Republican notion that there are two separate Americas. On the one side are "the unpretentious millions of authentic Americans; on the other stand the bookish all-powerful liberals who run the country but are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it" (13). This dual formulation became ingrained in the public's mind in particular due to the graphical representations of the results of the 2000 election, with its vast stretches of inland red denoting the Republican states and its small coastal blue regions denoting the Democratic states. The electoral map led many observers and commentators to draw th...