With the presidential race in full gear, pollsters are dying to find out who voters will choose. The real question regards why people hit the polls and vote the way they do. If either party can truly understand the motivations for voting, it can frame its message in a way to virtually guarantee victory. By the same token, a candidate who misreads his voting base, opposition, and undecideds can completely undermine himself (or herself…lest we forget, Hillary is waiting for Obama to be assassinated).

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas is one of the most influential works on the subject. Frank argues that working-class whites in America’s “Heartland” have shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party because they are voting on social issues, not economic ones. The drive to vote against abortion is overpowering the drive to vote against tax cuts for low-income social conservatives.

While Frank’s thesis makes sense, it isn’t wholly accurate. Princeton professor Larry Bartels rips into Frank’s contention. Bartels uses statistical data, in lieu of Frank’s “scholarly” decision to use anecdotal evidence in his pseudo autobiography. Bartels finds first that the switch from the Democratic to Republican Party has been an exclusively southern phenomenon. The trend can largely be attributed to the gulf of civil rights stemming from the 1964 Presidential Election between LBJ and Barry Goldwater.

1960 Presidential Electoral Map. What’s more surprising: the changing party bases or the fact that US Senator and former Klansman Robert Byrd was a viable candidate?

Further, Bartels finds that Frank’s argument isn’t geographically inaccurate, it is just not true. His studies note that college-educated white voters are more likely to vote on social issues than non-college-educated white voters. If anything, Democrats are winning the elite on social issues more than Republicans are winning the poor.

The final part of Bartels’ critique shows that non-college-educated whites tend to agree more with the Democrats than the Republicans on social issues, but let economic issues take primacy. So what are we left with? A group of low-income white voters with relatively little education who joined the Republican Party in the south, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. If Bartels’ representation is accurate, it certainly fits into a political narrative. Libertarianism is one of the most socially convenient ideologies because it endorses freedom. Even the most hardcore on both sides of the political aisle endorse freedom, right?

After a game like this, what ISN’T the matter with Kansas?

So if we truly have unpacked what and how a large portion of the electorate votes, the rest should be easy. McCain needs to tout his pro-liberty values and Obama, who replaces freedom with bureaucracy and rhetoric, needs to suppress the vote.

TheSilentMajority crystallizes this point in his latest post. He finds that the Republican Party has switched the message of freedom from 1994 to the message of social conservatism. Not surprisingly, the Republican Party has floundered as it has both lost its congressional majority, is completely outnumbered in the upcoming Presidential Election, and has accomplished very little (if you consider our budget deficit and the War in Iraq to be “small”). If McCain is to pull this one out, he will need to switch the Republican Party back to what it once was.

It’s the pragmatic thing to do.