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At the same time, some observers suggest that Kerry's positions on those issues may have mattered less than the fact that he simply seemed culturally alien to many rural and lower-income voters - as does the Democratic Party as a whole.
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"In the Southern states, there's a kind of antielitism which you would think, economically, would make these people pro-Democrat, but it's a cultural antielitism," says Andy Taylor, a political scientist at North Carolina State University. "Kerry personified the type of person that this philosophy does not like - an aristocratic, northeastern intellectual."

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