Marathon Pundit Exclusive: "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Debunked on Page One: UPDATED AGAIN

Every once in a while, I pick up a book written by a liberal to keep myself politically sharp. Right now I'm reading While Europe Slept, but the other day, I had Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" shipped to me. It was a New York Times best seller in 2004. I thumbed through the book, and then focused on the first paragraph of Frank's book:

The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent.

Whoah....

Of course the assumption is that the county is in Kansas, after all the book is about the Sunflower State. But that county, according to Thomas Frank's book, was McPherson County, a Sandhills county in neighboring Nebraska.

The Sandhills are fantastically beautiful, as the picture I took in 2004 in adjacent Hooker County shows. But the Sandhills are very sparsely populated.

In fact of the over 3,000 counties in the United States, McPherson is the seventh-least populated. According to the the 2000 US Census, just 533 people called it home.

Now don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the county went so heavily Republican--if only the rest of the nation could be so lucky. But when just 533 people live there, and probably only half of them voted in 2000, Frank is being a bit disingenuous by using McPherson County to make his point by singling out such a county with such a tiny population.

But there is more! McPherson isn't even the poorest! If you rank the counties by poverty level, McPherson isn't in the top ten of the nation's poorest counties, so says the Wall Street Journal, using US Census bureau data.

Let's take a look at per-capita income. Okay, this one comes from Wikipedia, but guess what? McPherson doesn't appear among the nation's top 100 poorest counties. Wiki cites the US Census as its source for its rankings.

There's a McPherson County listed in the 100 counties rated by lowest median household income, but that one is in South Dakota.

Here's a non-Wikipedia site, the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, and guess what, although the data is from 2004, its figures gel nicely with the Wikipedia entry. Like Wikipedia, that report cites the Census Bureau at its source.

Last year, Christopher Shea of the Boston "free registration required" fell for Frank's hooey:

One of the most trenchant elaborations of this view came in the 2004 bestseller ''What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," by the essayist and historian Thomas Frank. He argued that ''the poor," ''the weak," and ''the victimized" were increasingly throwing their lot in with Republicans, swayed by social issues into voting against their economic self-interest. How else to explain why McPherson County, Nebraska, among the poorest in the United States, gave 80 percent of its vote to President Bush in 2000?

But I'm right, Wikipedia (this time) is also right, and best-selling author Thomas Frank is full of shit--and he owes the 533 or so residents of McPherson County, Nebraska an apology. And Christopher Shea. As well as a bunch of liberal bloggers who fell for Frank's claim.

Frank's source for McPherson's "poverty?" A study by Patricia Funk and Jon Bailey, "Trampled Dreams: The Neglected Economy of the Rural Great Plains." (Walthill, Neb, Neb.: Center for Rural Affairs, 2000). That study wasn't a best-seller.

The Sandhills are gorgeous--visit them if you have the opportunity. I had to talk Mrs. Marathon Pundit into seeing them on the way home from the Black Hills--and she thoroughly enjoyed the byway adventure.

Finally, as to not hurt any feelings the US Census Bureau does not list rankings-by-counties on its web site. If forced, I will painstakingly double check the Wiki work.

UPDATE June 3:

Commenter Genevieve found a fantastic sight, DataPlace, which up until this morning I was unaware of that it existed.

The question of whether McPherson Co., NE, is/was the nation's poorest is interesting. I did my own quick search after reading this post. DataPlace is the source of the following statistics.

In "Average Adjusted Gross Income for 2002" where every county in the nation is ranked, I found McPherson County, NE ranked 15th lowest in AGI. Still, McPherson County had about $5700 more AGI than Catron County, NM, which had the nation's lowest AGI in 2002.

I played around with a lot of other statistics on DataPlace, I couldn't place McPherson anywhere near the bottom.

Back to Frank's source for labeling McPherson County America's poorest. He seems to be using the Noam Chomsky playbook, use a source, no matter how obscure, to prove his "point."

Second June 3 update:

Commenter John Crabtree, although critical of my post, was gracious enough to track down the source Frank cited in What's The Matter with Kansas in the comments section. I tried to find it via Google and Yahoo!, and it's at times like these when I realize I should add a collaborator. Two heads are sometimes better than one.

Here is the report:

http://www.cfra.org/pdf/Trampled_Dreams.pdf Go to page 10.

Although I can't quite figure out the methodology of the statistical table on that page, and I did take two very difficult statistics classes in college, the table lists only Great Plains counties. In fact, the report, once again by Patricia Funk and Jon Bailey, talks only about the poverty on the Plains.

Once again, here is the opening paragraph to Thomas Frank's book:

The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent.

And in the footnotes, the source is of course the Funk and Bailey study.

Here are the corresponding footnotes from Frank's book:

I am referring to McPherson County, Nebraska, but there several counties in that state where extreme poverty coincides with extreme Republicanism--just as there are in Kansas and the Dakotas. My source for the for the county poverty rankings is "Trampled Dreams: The Neglected Economy of the Rural Great Plains," a study by Patricia Funk and John Bailey (Walthill, Nebraska,: Center for Rural Affairs, 2000), p. 6.

Okay, case is closed, and it's time for Thomas Frank to issue a retraction.

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