What’s the Matter With Kansas? aptly describes the 2016 election — but was written in 2004

Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? ignited something of a firestorm within political science. It was attempting to explain recent trends in American politics, but its analysis wasn’t reflected in much actual data. Yet that book explains the 2016 election far better than it did the election cycle in which it was published.

Frank’s basic story was that the white working class was abandoning the Democratic Party. It was doing so, Frank argued, because Republicans had offered persuasive cultural arguments: They campaigned about abortion, guns, religion, same-sex marriage, and other cultural touchstones that worried conservative, poorer whites in rural states like Kansas. This convinced these white voters that culture was more important than their dire economic circumstances (on which Democrats offered more favorable policies), and so they voted Republican.

But then, Frank further argued, Republicans governed with a bait and switch. Though they’d offered culture, they delivered a conservative economic agenda, cutting taxes on the wealthy, undoing business regulations, and undermining the social safety net in ways that actually hurt these working-class white voters. The economic agenda always took precedence, and the culture war would have to wait for a more favorable time.

This was a popular and persuasive argument, backed up by a number of very entertaining anecdotes in Frank’s book, but it ran into some inconvenient facts. As Larry Bartels noted in his essay “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” it was hard to justify Frank’s main premises.

A lot of this depended on one’s definition of the white working class — is it about lower-income workers, people without college educations, or something else? (Nate Silver has some very useful reflections on this issue.) But across definitions, some common trends could be discerned.

Yes, lower-class whites had abandoned Democrats in the South, for reasons that had little to do with modern Republican cultural appeals and a great deal to do with the racial realignment of the late 20th century, but that didn’t seem true for the rest of the country. Working-class whites outside the South actually seemed to be growing slightly more Democratic. Income was still a strong predictor of the vote, and poorer whites were still far more likely than wealthy whites to vote Democratic.

Twelve years later, the facts seem to be moving more in the direction of Franks’ arguments. We don’t yet have National Election Studies data for 2016 to compare across a long timeline, but a variety of indicators suggest the white working class has sharply and truly moved out of the Democratic coalition, even in the non-South.

According to a Pew study, whites with no more than high school diplomas broke 45-44 in favor of Republicans in 2008 — basically a tie. By 2012, that division had split to 53-38, and this year it was 59-33, a 26-point Republican advantage. This, notably, did not start because of Donald Trump — there was a bigger jump between 2008 and 2012 than between 2012 and 2016 — although he may have magnified the trend.

And if Republicans offered a bait and switch in 2004, it pales compared with what’s been going on just since the election this year. Trump didn’t offer “culture” in quite the same way Republicans did 12 years ago. Rolling back LGBTQ rights didn’t appear to be much of a priority for him, and his pro-life credentials have a pretty short history. But he undoubtedly offered identity, declaring common cause with working class whites and dubbing himself a “blue-collar billionaire.“ His appeals were sometimes explicitly racist.

At other times, he offered more of a traditional appeal to poorer whites, tinged with aspects of race, class, and gender, suggesting that other people (urbanites, illegal immigrants, Syrian refugees, etc.) were unjustly coming to take what was rightly theirs. He promised to build a wall and drain the swamp to restore the country to what it was in mythical times.

The pivot since Election Day has been dizzying. The wall at the border may never actually be built and was probably just a “campaign device.“ The special interest lobbyists Trump warned about won’t need to lobby anymore; he’s putting them in the Cabinet. His pick for Treasury secretary comes from Goldman Sachs. Other picks are a collection of billionaires and Washington insiders.

The message so far from the Cabinet picks is that the Trump administration will not be making a priority of fulfilling the candidate’s populist promises anytime soon, but will quickly work on a budget deal to cut taxes, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and possibly even radically reshape Medicare, all of which will likely harm the working class in material ways.

This seems very much the kind of election that Frank described in his book. He just described it a bit too early.