Lawton Chiles famously said that Bill Clinton "knows how to speak cracker", and Clinton's drawling persona and successful performances in the 1992 and 1996 Presidential elections have contributed to his image as a kind of avatar of Appalachia--a politician whose ability to woo the "white working classes", as they are nearly inevitably described, has become legendary.
This legend was still powerful in 2008, when Hillary Clinton's success among so-called "beer track" voters was said to owe much to her husband's successes, and it's still powerful today, when I feel like pundits are constantly speculating about what folksy idioms and charming arguments Bill Clinton might have been using to secure those "white working class" voters that Barack Obama is said to have trouble with.
No one has ever accused Mike Dukakis of knowing "how to speak cracker". He didn't do very well in 1988, and is remembered as a kind of prissy "bloodless suburban reformer", as Mark Schmitt wonderfully put it. So I crunched the numbers on where Clinton improved on Dukakis the most, both in 1992 and 1996, and I think Clinton's legendary "bubba" abilities are a partial myth. Just a partial myth--he indeed did well in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and in his home state of Arkansas. But he also did well in California, Illinois, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Ohio--oh, and not the parts of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio you're probably thinking of. Let's learn more.