Barbie Snodgrass had agreed to meet me at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, on a strip of fast-food restaurants and auto shops west of downtown Columbus, Ohio, but she didn’t have much time to talk. Her shift as a receptionist at a medical clinic, which got her out of the house at six in the morning, had just ended, at three; the drive home, to a housing development in a working-class suburb south of the city, took half an hour. She then had a little more than an hour to eat, change clothes, let the dog out, check up on her sister’s two teen-age daughters—Sierra and Ashley, who were under her care—and then drive back into Columbus, where she worked the evening shift cleaning the studios of a local television station, and where her day ended, at ten. She also worked some weekends. She was forty-two, single, overweight, and suffering from stomach pains.

Snodgrass sat down at my table and refused the offer of a soft drink. She was wearing a drab ensemble of gray cotton sweatpants and a loose-fitting pale-yellow knit top, and her brown hair fell in bangs just above her eyes. I asked for her thoughts about the Presidential candidates, and she said, “Someone who makes two hundred or three hundred thousand a year, who eats a regular meal, who doesn’t have to struggle, who doesn’t worry if the lights are going to be turned out—if he doesn’t walk in your shoes, he can’t understand.”

In Snodgrass’s shoes, it hardly made sense to draw a paycheck. “You’re working for what?” she asked. She hadn’t finished college, and the two jobs that kept her “constantly moving” brought in a little more than forty thousand dollars a year, but after the mortgage (a thousand a month), car payments (three hundred and fifty), levies for supplies at the girls’ public high school, fuel, electricity, stomach medicine, and a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries each week (down from eight bags to four at Kroger’s supermarket, because of inflation) there was basically nothing left to spend. She could cut corners—go out for a McDonald’s Dollar Meal instead of spending seven dollars on a bag of potatoes and cooking at home. But that meant the end of any kind of family life for her nieces.

“These days, you have to struggle,” she said. “As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can’t take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you’ve got to think how you’re going to put food on the table.” Snodgrass’s parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the “very privileged.” She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. “That’s who’s middle-class now,” she said. “Two parents, two kids? That’s over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don’t have nobody to look out for them. You’re one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck.”

Snodgrass, who has always voted Democratic, was paying close attention to the Presidential campaign—she had taped both candidates’ Convention speeches, and watched them when she had time—but her faith in politicians was somewhere close to zero. She wanted a leader who would watch out for people in the “middle class,” people like her who had no one on their side. “I think McCain is going to be just like Bush the next eight years,” she said. “I don’t see how it’s going to change.” To her, Sarah Palin, a working mother close to her own age, felt more like a token choice than like a kindred spirit. “I think McCain picked her so women can relate to her, not because she’s the best person for the job,” Snodgrass said. “She’s more of a show for the American family.” Hillary Clinton had been better, but even she couldn’t fully apprehend Barbie Snodgrass’s predicament.

She remained uninspired by Barack Obama. His Convention speech had gone into detail about his policy proposals on matters like the economy and health care, which seemed tailored to attract a voter like Snodgrass, but they filled her with suspicion. His promise to rescind the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans struck her as incredible: “How many people do you know who make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? What is that, five per cent of the United States? That’s a joke! If he starts at a hundred thousand, I might listen. Two hundred fifty—that’s to me like people who hit the lottery.” In fact, only two per cent of Americans make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, but that group earns twelve per cent of the national income. Nonetheless, the circumstances of Snodgrass’s life made it impossible for her to imagine that there could possibly be enough taxable money in Obama’s upper-income category—which meant that he was being dishonest, and that she would eventually be the one to pay. “He’ll keep going down, and when it’s to people who make forty-five or fifty thousand it’s going to hit me,” she said. “I’d have to sell my home and live in a five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with gang bangers out in my yard, and I’d be scared to death to leave my house.”

Snodgrass reacted with equal skepticism to Obama’s proposal for expanding health care. “It scares the heck out of me,” she said. “If the employers are going to cover more, we’re going to get less in our raises. My raise every year is like a cost-of-living raise. How are they going to be able to give me more money?” The margin of error in her life was so slim, she felt, that any attempt to improve lives with ambitious new programs could only end up harming her. Obama’s idealistic language left Snodgrass cold. “He’s not saying to me how he’s going to make my life better,” she said. She wanted to hear exactly how the next President was going to remove some of the tremendous financial weight bearing down on her—reduce gas prices, cut the cost of medicine—not in the distant future but right away. A friend of hers who worked three jobs refused to support Obama on the theory that he was a Muslim, but Snodgrass said that it didn’t matter to her what race or religion the next President was, nor did the ugly tactics of the campaign have any effect other than to disgust her. What mattered was “your daily life, your daily day, job, family, what you do that keeps you from robbing the video store down the street.”

Snodgrass sat talking for much longer than she had initially offered; by the end, her words tumbled out in a plaintive rush, as if under some inner pressure. “You want somebody there who’s going to take care of us,” she said. “I’m very scared about who they put in there, because it’s either going to get a lot worse than it is or it’s going to keep going where it is, which is bad.” She almost gasped. “Just give us a break. There’s no reprieve. No reprieve.”

Until the mid-seventies, the white working class—the heart of the New Deal coalition—voted largely Democratic. Since the Carter years, the percentages have declined from sixty to forty, and this shift has roughly coincided with the long hold of the Republican Party on the White House. The white working class—a group that often speaks of itself, and is spoken of, as forgotten, marginalized, even despised—is the golden key to political power in America, and it voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush twice, by seventeen per cent in 2000 and twenty-three per cent in 2004. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” directed its indignation at the baffling phenomenon of millions of Americans voting year after year against their economic self-interest. He concluded that the Republican Party had tricked working people with a relentless propaganda campaign based on religion and morality, while Democrats had abandoned these voters to their economic masters by moving to the soft center of the political spectrum. Frank’s book remains the leading polemic about the white reaction—the title alone has, for many liberals, become shorthand for the conventional wisdom—but it is hobbled by the condescending argument that tens of millions of Americans have become victims of a “carefully cultivated derangement,” or are simply stupid.

Last year, four sociologists at the University of Arizona, led by Lane Kenworthy, released a paper that complicates Frank’s thesis. Their study followed the voting behavior of the forty-five per cent of white Americans who identify themselves as working class. Mining electoral data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period—from the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the early eighties—and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since. But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion, and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift. Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that—during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated—the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. “Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being,” the study’s authors write. Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement. During Clinton’s Presidency, the downward economic spiral of these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that government could restore a sense of economic security.

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Such a change in party allegiance across a vast section of the electorate takes decades to achieve, and to undo. But this year should mark the beginning of a reverse migration. When will the class war ever finally drown out the culture war, if not in 2008? Under Republican rule in Washington, wages have stayed flat while income inequality has increased; the numbers of uninsured have soared; unemployment recently passed six per cent, its highest level since the early nineteen-nineties; gas and heating-oil prices have doubled, while basic food prices have gone up by fifty per cent; and the country’s financial system has come closer to collapse than at any moment since 1929. More profoundly, Republican dogma no longer offers convincing solutions, and in some cases it doesn’t even acknowledge the problems. (Income inequality has long been considered a nonissue in conservative free-market circles.) The question that Ronald Reagan asked voters to such devastating effect in 1980, when the white working class began turning away from Democrats—“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”—should, in theory, produce an equal and opposite effect this year.

This is particularly true in big, aging, economically battered swing states like Michigan, where unemployment is nearly nine per cent, and Ohio, where residents told me that a whole generation of young people is leaving the state to seek higher education and work elsewhere. A man in Brown County, along the Ohio River, in the southwestern part of the state, said that a year ago there was one foreclosure notice in the local paper each week; now the number is six or eight, and the listings for the week of September 12th announced fifty-three foreclosure sales in a county with only fifteen thousand households. In the town of Wilmington, outside Dayton, a D.H.L. facility with eight thousand workers—a third of the area’s population—is likely to close. On September 9th, the day I flew into Cincinnati, a woman named Marla Bell, attending an Obama rally near Dayton, told National Public Radio, “It almost feels like it’s a dying state.”

The next day, Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat who remains popular in Ohio, announced a budget shortfall that would require painful spending cuts across the board. The state’s budget director, Pari Sabety, told me, “There are a lot more part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, jobs that require a broader social safety net than we currently have. We are not creating high-value jobs at a rate that can absorb people who are losing high-value jobs of the old economy.” The economic crisis, she went on, is so grave that it has created room for a renewed discussion about the role of government in people’s lives. “Here’s the opportunity before us. What’s happening is a slow-motion Katrina to economies like ours. I feel like we are where F.D.R. was.”

Obama has had particular trouble with the prized demographic group that once delivered the Presidency to Roosevelt and his successors. Anecdotally, and in polls, unusually large numbers of working-class voters seem to remain undecided or determined to sit the election out, as if they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Republican this year but couldn’t fathom taking a chance on Obama. Roger Catt, a retired farmer and warehouse worker, who lives in a small town near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, characterized the choice this way: “McCain is more of the same, and Obama is the end of life as we know it.”

Gloria Fauss, the longtime political director in Ohio for the Service Employees International Union, or S.E.I.U., which backs Obama, said, “I’m very worried. The conventional wisdom is that the economy will trump this year. I’m not so sure. The economy may override social issues this year and people still might not vote for Obama.” Fauss has spent years studying the results of polls and focus groups among Ohio voters, and she has learned that judgments about character and values can be decisive even among those who rate jobs and health care as more important than abortion. “You can’t make the assumption that because people are suffering economically and the last eight years have been downhill and things are very bleak for them—you can’t make the assumption they’ll vote Democratic. There’s just no basis for that.”