Did Country Music Re-elect the President?

In the last installment of the Country Music Literature series, we examined the lyrical construction of country songs. The current article considers the political implications of country music and a Department of State official’s assertion that country music may have played an integral, perhaps even an essential, role in re-electing President Bush.

“In the course of election 2004, country music radio - far more than even the richest 527 group - inculcated and reinforced conservative values in the red state electorate, helped frame the issues of the day on terms favorable to the conservative position on those issues, and primed red state voters to respond positively to President Bush’s basic campaign message of family, country, and God.”-David J. Firestein

Midway through the 2004 election, I was invited to a small downtown Milwaukee rally featuring Vice President Dick Cheney. As Cheney finished his stump speech and began greeting the crowd, overhead speakers pumped out Brooks & Dunn’s recent hit “Only in America.” My first reaction to hearing the familiar tune was to speculate that Brooks & Dunn was one of the few artists that would allow a Republican candidate to use their material. Subsequently, I thought that perhaps the Bush-Cheney campaign felt that of any genre, country would be most popular among their base. Both theories are probably correct, but Department of State diplomat David J. Firestein suggests that these truths are only part of the story. Country music’s popularity in certain demographics serves to inculcate the Republican platform.

Firestein spends the first portion of his 2005 address searching for the measurable statistic that best differentiates 2004 red states from 2004 blue states (besides, of course, the citizens’ voting preferences). Firestein concludes that that statistic is the prevalence of country music radio stations, and uses Radio-Locator’s index of radio stations to correlate 2004 election results and U.S. Census data with country radio density. His results, summarized in figure form below, clearly show a strong relationship between the penetration of country radio and voting preferences:

These data are interesting, though somewhat unconvincing. More significant is that Firestein was able to closely correlate vote margins with country music radio density to the extent that he actually proposed two magic numbers: a Republican cannot win a state with less than one country radio station per 293,432 people, while a Democrat cannot win a state with more than one country radio station per 61,911 people. Predictably, those states in which country radio density was closest to the national average were “swing states.”

While Firestein is not a statistician, the association of country music listeners with a certain political perspective is unsurprising and the subject of numerous stereotypes. The more compelling question is one of causation: is country music listenership simply a symptom of red states, an attribute of a certain mindset, or does country music actually form and reinforce the political perspective of its listeners?

While Firestein appears to favor the latter viewpoint, a critical reading of his work suggests that it is compatible with both theories. First, Firestein notes the large number of spins that the most popular songs receive, such that their lyrics and melodies are pounded into the minds of regular listeners. Perhaps more significant is that the most popular songs do not exhibit great thematic diversity. Firestein examined Arbitron’s listing of the 50 most popular country songs for each year from 2000-2004 and quantified recurring themes:

Another prevalent theme that Firestein noted, but did not quantify, was nostalgia. Strikingly, each of these major themes is very consistent with the Bush-Cheney worldview and inconsistent with at least the Republican portrayal of a Democratic America. Is it any wonder that red states, which are continually saturated with such lyrics, were more receptive to the Bush message?

The most important facet of Firestein’s article is his assertion that the Bush campaign understood its base’s allegiance to country music and purposefully manipulated it. Brooks & Dunn songs served as Bush’s campaign theme song in 2000 and 2004. In 2000, instead of the traditional oral introduction by a political dignitary, then-Governor Bush was introduced simply by Brooks & Dunn’s live performance of “Hard Workin’ Man,” as if that popular song completely and entirely summarized his qualifications and character. Nearly a dozen major country artists performed at the 2004 Republican Convention, and Bush’s behavior and attire frequently employs such country symbolism as cowboy boots, a western belt and a “Texas swagger.”

Armed with this evidence, Firestein’s final conclusion is an audacious one:

Bush won this election because he managed to speak, often in subtextual ways, to a deep-seated yearning inside many Americans for that time in American history, real or imagined, when families were more traditional, more whole and closer-knit, when children said the Pledge of Allegiance in school without challenge or controversy, and when there was sharper moral clarity in our national life and greater piety in our spiritual life. No force, in recent years, has done more to craft, codify, inculcate, reinforce, and popularize this specific sense of identity, particularly in the states now considered red, than contemporary country music radio. The Bush campaign’s great achievement in the 2004 election was to recognize and tap into this country music-fueled vision and convincingly invoke its code and symbolism, doing so in ways that were largely invisible to most analysts but intuitively understood by the target audience.

Ultimately, I think that Firestein’s work is plagued by an irresolvable “chicken vs. egg” conundrum. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that country music correlates rather nicely with conservatism, but I don’t think that he adequately proves that the latter is necessary the result of the former, or that even a fraction of the variation between red states and blue states can be explained by country music per se. However, his work does pose interesting questions about the past, present and future. Might the outcome of the 2004 election had been different had Bush’s campaign not succeeded in utilizing the country radio audience, and might manipulation of country radio listeners be something that moderate or even Democratic candidates could utilize in the future? What role, if any, will country music play in the 2008 election, with no obvious “cowboy” among the front-runners?

Watch: David Firestein discusses his theory in greater depth at Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs

Adapted from: Firestein, David J. “The Honky Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day, 72(3): 83-88.