Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

This Sounds About Right

In Slate, Paul Freedman argues that terrorism, and not "moral values", was what tipped the election to Bush. He points out that:
Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry.
On the other hand, "moral values" voters tended to be concentrated in states that went for Bush in 2000, rather than in swing states.

That probably sounds right. I think the "moral values" vote got a lot of initial play because the national news media was genuinely surprised to discover how many voters - it was more than a fifth - listed that as the most important issue. After four years of news coverage about war, terrorism, and the economy, I think they were surprised to discover that anyone thought of "moral values" as the most important issue. The surprise was magnified by the fact that the idea of voting on "moral values" surely seems utterly alien to the New York- and Washington-based national media. And it was further magnified by the fact that these "values-voters" seemed to come totally out of nowhere since, unless I'm mistaken, "moral values" wasn't an option in exit polling before this year.

Having gotten initial exposure because of the general surprise of the mainstream national media, the "values-voters" story was kept alive by talking-heads on the right and the left who saw it as in their interest to lock in as conventional wisdom the idea that Bush won reelection on the backs of socially conservative Christians. On the right, social conservatives have an obvious interest in making Bush think they were the margin of victory - if the President accrued "political capital" in his reelection, they want it spent on them and their issues, dadgumit! And on the left, the reasons were two-fold. There were the Paul Krugmans, for whom the belief that the Democrats lost because Middle Americans are intolerant bigots is a salve. And there were Paul Begalas, who thought that the idea, if accepted, would push the Bush Administration to the right, causing a centrist backlash that would redound to the Democrats' advantage in 2006.

I'm always wary of monocausal explanations for historical phenomena, especially elections. Are social conservatives a substantial part of Bush's base? Of course they are, but so are basically libertarian Wall Street Journal-types, anti-Communist Miami Cubans, and a whole host of other groups. Are Republican-voting social-conservatives a growing part of the electorate? I think that's probably the case, but it's a slow, generational process, rather than a "swing" phenomenon that tilts any given election. Would it be a bad idea for Bush to ignore the concerns of this group? Yeah, but that's because they're a substantial part of his base, and one that I think is more than willing to bolt if they get jilted a few more times, rather than because they're the group that put him over the top.