The Ghost Vote, and Six Days on the Road

washingtonmonthly.com — A chronic flaw in political analysis is the tendency to forget that yesterday’s demographic cleavages and political allegiances have not been frozen in amber. For many years after the turbulent days of the 1960s and 1970s, you’d hear references to the “Wallace vote” in discussions of southern politics, long after many actual “Wallace voters” were dead and buried. The same is even more true of “Reagan Democrats,” still around to many writers even though Ronnie has long since passed into hagiographical status. That’s why I found it interesting to read AEI vice president Henry Olsen’s essay suggesting that Rick Santorum’s appeals to white-working-class voters represent a doomed effort to revive a sort of ghost vote, based on “Reagan Democrat” stereotypes that are at least two decades out of date.

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