“Bush’s first-term policies benefited…
“Bush’s first-term policies benefited the rich and yet he remains most popular in the poorest states”
Let’s be careful not to jump to conclusions based on the ecological fallacy. According to exit polls, Bush lost the South among voters making $50,000 / year and less; if only voters making $50,000 / year and less had voted, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Virginia would all be blue states, and South Carolina and Louisiana would have been too close to call.
Certainly there are lots of reasons to worry about the degree to which white working-class men in the South participate in the rise and maintenance of hard Right politics. But we should be worrying much more about the ongoing political and cultural stranglehold of the white economic elite in Southern states; they are far more reliably and far more lopsidedly skewed to the Right, and they are the ones who are usually responsible for this mess.
Anticopyright.