Culture Over Issues?

Douthat ponders the return of Northeastern Republicans:

What turns off Northeasterners, as Caldwell suggested a decade ago, is less a specific issue like abortion than “the broader cultural claims of those who put it forward” — the sense, that is, that a vote for the G.O.P. is a vote for the habits and mores of Alabama or Mississippi (or a caricature thereof), complete with guns in the cupboard and creationism in the schools.

The G.O.P.’s Dixie problem, in other words, is similar to the Democratic Party’s New England problem. Americans voted against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry because they were liberals, yes, but more importantly because they were Massachusetts liberals, which made them seem like cultural as well as political outliers to much of the national electorate. Likewise, the political history of the Bush administration would have been different, and probably less divisive, if Bush had been a conservative Catholic from Wisconsin rather than a conservative evangelical from Texas.