More morally valueless election results

From the start, I was suspicious of the media's rush to claim that voters chose Bush because of "moral values." It struck me as a vague issue, which I thought the media -- perhaps projecting insecurities -- interpreted to mean that a majority of voters don't think Democrats have any. In fact, I thought, fear of dark swarthy men blowing up buildings was the more important reason for Bush's victory. Add to that Bush's base voters, who will always assume that Republicans are the only thing standing between them and the banning of the Bible, and you've got a Bush victory.

In this week's The New Yorker, Louis Menand asks, "Did the voters send a message?" and takes a closer look at the exit polls. He makes what I believe are important observations that the Democratic Party should be studying. Unfortunately, the magazine doesn't seem to have the piece on their website.

The National Election Pool questionnaire asked people leaving the polls to pick “the ONE issue that mattered most in decising how you voted for the president.” These were the reported results:

Education – 4%
Taxes – 5%
Health care – 8%
Iraq – 15%
Terrorism – 19%
Economy/jobs – 20%
Moral values – 22%

Eighty percent of the respondents who picked "moral values" as the issue that was most important to them voted for Bush, but even the Bush pollster dismissed the significance of the poll. The "moral values" number, Van Lohuizen [a leading pollster for the Bush campaign] said at Stanford, is "entirely determined by what else is on the list." Voters weren't asked to name an issue that mattered to them; they were asked, in what is known in polling as a "closed-ended question,” to pick one answer out of seven. “And, if you look at the list, there are a lot more places for a Kerry voter to park himself than for a Bush voter to park himself,” Van Lohuizen said. “That’s point No. 1. Point No. 2: if you give people a list of seven and you ask them what’s their top concern and the highest number is twenty-two, that means there is no consensus. It means that there was no one issue that drove the election.”

The belief that the issue of “moral values” was somehow decisive is tied to the belief that a greater proportion of voters this year were highly religious. This, too, is a belief unsupported by the data. “As a conservative, you love to see the liberal media twinge and say, ‘Oh, my God, it’s these moral values,’” Van Lohuizen said. “It was an important factor, but I have seen no data that it was more important in ’04 than it was in 2000 or ’96. I’ve seen no data that, in the composition of the electorate, the religious voter was more heavily represented.” More churchgoers turned out to vote in 2004 than in 2000, but only because more people turned out to vote.

[…]

“Why did President Bush win this election?” Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, said at the Stanford conference. “I would suggest that the answer can be expressed in a single phrase: 9/11.” No one there disagreed. “Fifty-four per cent of voters on Election Day said that the country was safer now than it was before September 11,2001,” Langer pointed out. “And perhaps, I would suggest, more important, forty-nine per cent of voters said they trusted only President Bush to handle terrorism, eighteen points more than said they trusted only John Kerry.” He went on, “Among those who trust only Bush to handle terrorism, ninety-seven per cent, quite logically, voted for him. Now, right there, if forty-nine per cent of Americans trust only Bush to handle terrorism and ninety-seven per cent of them voted for him, those are forty-eight of his total fifty-one percentage points in this election. Throw in a few more votes on ancillary issues and that’s all she wrote.” Langer thinks that a key statistic is the change in the votes of married women. Gore won the women’s vote by eleven per cent; Kerry won by only three per cent and he lost most of those votes among married women. Bush got forty-nine per cent of the votes of married women in 2000; he got fifty-five per cent this year. And when you ask married women whom they trust to keep the country safe from terrorists fifty-three per cent say “only Bush.” (The really salient demographic statistic from the election is one that most Democrats probably don’t even want to think about: If white men could not vote, Kerry would have defeated Bush by seven million votes.”

And beyond 9/11, there was Iraq. To nearly half the voters, Iraq was a mistake from the beginning or a good idea screwed up by Team Bush incomepetence. To the other half of voters, it was something they supported enthusiastically and, like the president, refused to admit they'd made a mistake. There was a reason the battle of Fallujah was postponed from April, when it would have been bloody, but may have shifted momentum in the war, to November, when it was bloody but probably too late for Iraq...and for Kerry.

Menand comes to the following conclusion, which I fear will not be heeded by the party.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what the science of public opinion concludes. It only matters what the politicians conclude. If Democrats believe that the lesson of the election is that the Party needs to move to the right, then, if it moves, that will be the lesson. It might be wiser for the Democrats to chalk Bush’s reelection up to 9/11 and stick to their positions. The Democratic candidate did not lose votes in 2004: Kerry got five million more votes than Al Gore got in 2000, when Gore won a plurality. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Bush got nine million more votes than he did four years ago. But it wasn’t because the country moved to the right. The issue that seems to have permitted an incumbent with an unimpressive approval rating to survive reelection was not an ideological one. The country did not change radically in the past four years. Circumstances did.

It is worrisome. Democrats are beaten time and again as they try to look like Republicans. The discourse on Social Security has already shifted from "reform" as in fix, to "reform" as in do away with. And just this morning I heard Governor Bill Richardson refer repeatedly to the need to understand "the heartland." What the #@$% is the heartland?

I don't think the Democrats need to understand "the heartland," per se, since it doesn't actually exist anymore. What the Democrats need to do is to better define who they are and what they stand for; they need to take strong alternative positions in opposition to the whack jobs that are now in control of Congress; and they need to communicate all of that a whole lot better, with or without the help of a cowering press. And they have a scant two years to make that happen in time for the mid-terms.

And they need for a few million more voters to grow up and stop believing that George W. Bush and whoever is lined up to run in '08 is the equivalent of a big ol' blanket under which they can hide from the terra-ists.

UPDATED to correct a syntactical non-sequitur.