Overhyping the Evangelical Vote?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
1

With all these threads going on that started out talking about political issues and evolved into arguments about religion, I thought it might be interesting to re-examine the initial supposition, namely that evangelicals, motivated by the gay-marriage initiatives, handed the election to Bush.

I think that’s wrong – I think the War on Terror was the key issue overall in the election. While there may be a weak argument to be made concerning Ohio specifically, most of the anti-gay-marriage initiatives were not in swing states. Also, the “values” question on the exit polls was undefined, and could mean anything from the gay-marriage issue to the importance of integrity in leaders. Similarly, the War on Terror and Iraq were split into two categories, instead of being put into the category of “national security issues.” [Please refer to Thunderbolt22’s thread for more discussion on the exit poll data].

More than anything, this election was a referendum on George W. Bush as commander in chief – and he won it.

Political science ph.D. student David Adesnik, of University of Virginia, has related thoughts:

Posted 9:25 PM by David Adesnik
THE GOP HAS THE EVANGELICALS, THE DEMOCRATS HAVE THE BLACK VOTE:

Imagine that John Kerry had prevailed in Ohio or even nation-wide. Would the experts attribute his victory to surging African-American turnout or to a widespread repudiation of Bush’s foreign policy?

Hypothetical questions may not have answers, but I am struck at how far Democratic pundits are willing to go in order to demonstrate that Bush’s victory has nothing to do with his foreign policy and everything to do with evangelical homophobia and ignorance.

Laura Rozen says that if you are complacent about Christian conservatives’ assault on our civil rights, then you are just plain ignorant
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001331.html
(like David Brooks Opinion | The Values-Vote Myth - The New York Times ). Laura approvingly cites an e-mail sent to Andrew Sullivan which argues that:

[Email excerpt] To point out that the evangelicals voted in the same proportion for Bush as they did in 2000 gets a fact right and misses the point. What matters is that the Bush vote by these folks did not erode in the face of catastrophic management of post-invasion Iraq, prisoner atrocities, transformation of the surplus into a suffocating deficit and terrible job performance. It seems to me that their religious views trump everything. You switched your vote - why didn’t they? The answer is complex, but you can bet it includes homophobia deftly catalyzed by Mr. Rove et al. [End email excerpt]

Sullivan responds: “He’s got a point, no?” Actually, no, no he doesn’t. Leaving aside the issue of whether Kerry would’ve been even worse for Iraq than Bush, I think it’s misleading to suggest that homophobia compensated for evangelicals’ hypothetical dissatisfaction with Bush’s foreign policy.

Again, think about African-Americans. How badly would a Democratic president or candidate have to perform to lose more than 15% of the black vote?
This trend in black voting doesn’t provoke much concern because observers on both sides consider it to be rational.

But when it comes to evangelicals, we presume that their motives for voting Republican are misguided, illegitimate, or even undemocratic. But what if evangelicals, like African-Americans – and as Richard Cohen points out, American Jews ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35436-2004Nov8.html )-- consistently vote for one party because of its basic cultural orientation, rather than because of its position on any single issue?

Matt Yglesias wants to know exactly when John Kerry or any other Democratic candidate was condescending toward evangelicals.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8844
The answer to Matt’s rhetorical is “almost never”. But that’s not that point.

Negative attitudes towards evangelicals, justified or not, abound in the Blue State Media. Democratic candidates may avoid invoking them, but I don’t think that even Matt would deny that Christians, especially evangelicals, are looked down upon by the glitterati. After all, Matt himself refers to the them as “chumps” and suggests that they are “detached from reality”.

In essence, evangelicals face the same dilemma as African-Americans. They consider one major party to be anathema, thus ensuring that the other major party takes them for granted.

Steve Waldman, editor of Beliefnet.com, suggests that Christian activists may not let Bush get away with being as non-committal as he was during his first term.
Opinion | On a Word and a Prayer - The New York Times
(Laura Rozen cites Waldman approvingly.) But how much is going to change while the underlying political dynamic remains the same?

2

Another interesting observation of the voting data:

http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002599.html

Those Gay Hating Blue Staters

It’s become something of an article of faith among the Left that Kerry lost due to homophobic social conservatives voting for Bush because they oppose gay marriage for no good reason. The fact that they lost ground in the House and Senate, and in many state races as well, doesn’t seem to register.

Now we see this compilation on Real Clear Politics (via Instapundit) that shows that Bush gained in the percentage of the vote he received in every single state!
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2004-2000.html
Nowhere did Kerry increase the Democratic percentage of the vote.

Perhaps of more interest to those obsessed with the blue-red divide, Bush’s biggest percentage gains occurred in Blue states:

Hawaii: +7.8
Rhode Island: +7.0

Other blue states returned surprising increases as well:

California: +2.6
Connecticut: +5.6
New York: +5.3
Massachusetts: +4.5
New Jersey: +6.2

So even in states which Kerry won, the margin of Democratic victory decreased, sometimes sharply, compared to 2000. If, and that’s a big if, these trends continue in 2008, the Democrats face a loss in a dramatic landslide.

The Left in America needs to understand that they have a fundamental problem. It is they, not the Right, who are heavily dependent on voters choosing them due to social issues. Younger voters support the Left almost purely due to social issues like abortion and gay rights. Younger voters reject leftist 20th-century solutions for a broad range of issues like medical care, trade, national security and Social Security. If forced to run purely on those issues the Left would get creamed. Only among older voters who remember the New Deal and the Great Society does the Left perform better on economic or management issues. The young and middle-aged don’t trust the Left’s centralized hierarchal solutions anymore.

The more the Left ignores this problem, the worse it will be for them at the polls, as those older voters whose world view was stamped in the Left’s glory days of the mid-20th century die off. Social issues will keep the younger voters for only so long. Eventually, they will trade social issues for economic ones.

Posted by Shannon Love on November 10, 2004 12:38 PM | TrackBack

3

Charles Krauthammer, infamous neo-con, takes on the myth of the “Christian Redneck” vote driving the election results:

‘Redneck vote’ is a liberal myth

In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained a USA Today headline: “Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP.” Overnight, the revolt of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom.

At the time, I looked into this story line and found not a scintilla of evidence to support it. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory.

Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.

In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to “isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism” in its unfailing drive to “summon our nasty devils.”

Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest? Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that “moral values” ranked highest in the answer to Question J: “Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for President?”

It is a thin reed upon which to base a general theory of the '04 election. The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare plurality over the others.

Look at the choices: education 4%, taxes 5%, health care 8%, Iraq 15%, terrorism 19%, economy and jobs, 20%, moral values 22%. “Moral values” encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood’s influence, the general coarsening of the culture and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war.

The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: “war issues” or “foreign policy issues” and “economic issues.”

If you pit group against group, moral values comes in dead last: war issues at 34%, economic issues at 33% and moral values at 22%.

And we know that this is the real ranking. After all, the exit poll is just a single poll. We had dozens of polls in the runup to the election that showed that the chief concerns were the war on terror, the war in Iraq and the economy.

Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush’s victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. This is more nonsense. Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1% nationwide. In Ohio, the increase was 1% - less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.

This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals and from infecting the blue-state media. So once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat.

Originally published on November 12, 2004

4

One more: The Myth of the Republican Mullah-cracy:

Myths of the Republican Mullah-cracy
You can’t blame Jesus for the voters’ choice
John Hood

It took only a few hours for media talking heads to come up with an explanation for why the tax-cutting, war-mongering ignoramus George W. Bush got re-elected on Tuesday. It couldn’t have been, they agreed, that the electorate truly wanted four more years of Republican domestic and foreign policies. After all, didn’t John Kerry win every substantive point on the issues that really matter? Wasn’t Bush an accidental, illegitimate president in the first place? Another explanation had to be found.

Quickly scanning the exit polling, pundits spotted that 22 percent of voters had said “moral issues” were the most important in the race, and they broke heavily for Bush. A-ha! Now they had a talking point: evil mastermind Karl Rove had used the same-sex marriage issue to turn out so many religious conservatives that they overwhelmed everyone’s likely-voter models and became a disproportionate share of the 2004 electorate.

The initially unspoken, but soon loudly proclaimed, implication of this fact was that Bush and the Republicans had bamboozled these voters, whose real economic interests lay with the Democrats. They didn’t truly support Bush on substantive domestic and foreign-policy issues. They were just anti-gay bigots. As the spin got more frenzied Wednesday and Thursday, words like “jihadis” and “mullahs” got attached to these deluded and dangerous Bush voters, whom Democrats and sympathetic analysts described as something akin to a bizarre and perversely fascinating lost tribe just discovered in the rain forests of Borneo. By weekend, an inevitable backlash against the frenzy had set in.

The problem with all this is that, while comforting to many Kerry supporters and exhilarating for some social-conservative leaders, the notion that Bush won primarily because religious voters turned out for him does not seem to be backed up by any real evidence. Few reporters or commentators appear to have gone back to examine the 2000 exit polls, which would seem to be necessary if one wishes to assert a trend.

I did. I found that the percentage of voters sampled who said they attended church at least weekly was the same?42 percent?in both 2000 and 2004. The percentage never attending church was also the same, at 15 percent. The middle group, those attending occasionally, was, you guessed it, 42 percent each time. Interestingly, while Bush slightly improved his standing among frequent churchgoers, by about a point in 2004, his support grew by 3 to 4 points among those attending seldom or never.

Yep, it was the atheist vote that really put Bush over the top in 2004.

There could be other ways to salvage the myth of the Republican mullah-cracy. For example, one might argue that it is unfair to equate church-going with religiosity or cultural conservatism.

Another potential proof: More people identified themselves as conservatives in 2004 (34 percent) than in 2000 (29 percent). But there are all kinds of conservatives, including quite a few who are socially conservative and hawkish and in favor of privatizing Social Security. Sorry, this doesn’t prove anything other than people are increasingly willing to label themselves as conservative rather than moderate.

OK, what about issue positions? In 2000, about 40 percent of voters in the exit poll said that abortion should be mostly or always illegal. In 2004, it was 42 percent. Not exactly a huge jump. And we don’t know how many of those are single-issue voters on abortion. Both parties have significant minorities who disagree with the official party position: about a quarter of pro-lifers voted for Kerry, while around one-third of pro-choicers picked Bush. On same-sex marriage, the issue was not polled in 2000 so it is impossible to say with certainty how the two electorates compare, but it is unlikely that this year’s voters were significantly more conservative on it. In fact, the public’s position is more nuanced here than the insta-spin would have you believe. About as many favored civil unions but not official marriage (35 percent) as favored neither (37 percent), and Bush was preferred by both groups over Kerry.

Well, perhaps there was no national trend but it happened in selected states such as Ohio. Nope. In the 2000 exit poll for Ohio, the percentage of frequent churchgoers was higher (45 percent) than in 2004 (40 percent). Bush did win a larger majority of religious Ohio voters in 2004 than he did four years ago, but there were fewer of them proportionally. Besides, saying that the religious-vote affect mattered in a few key states changes the nature of the media spin, which has been trying to assert it as a sweeping national “explanation” for Bush’s popular vote.

That leaves the initial assertion about 22 percent of voters citing moral issues as most important, higher than the share citing terrorism, Iraq, the economy, or other issues. When I looked more closely at this question, however, doubts immediately presented themselves. For one thing, the answers were broken out in ways that biased the analysis. While the poll did not attempt to distinguish the various moral issues that voters might be thinking about?abortion, marriage, wars for oil, etc.?it did list “taxes” and “the economy” separately, as well as “terrorism” and “Iraq.” Of course, for many voters, these are not separate issues. You may disagree with them, but most voters sampled in the exit poll said that the war in Iraq was part of the overall war on terrorism. And many right-leaning voters see tax policy as inextricably linked with economic growth and job creation (at least a few freedom-loving folks even see tax cuts as a moral issue?imagine that!)

In short, the question is flawed and the answers easily misunderstood. Moreover, it doesn’t compare well with the 2000 exit poll, in which “moral issues” was not listed as an option. On the other hand, you can track the impact of foreign policy over time. In 2000, only 12 percent said that “foreign affairs” was the most important issue in the presidential race, and they broke 54 percent to 40 percent for Bush over Gore. In 2004, a combined 34 percent identified foreign policy (either Iraq or the war on terrorism) as the most important, and they appear to have broken for Bush by 59 percent to 40 percent. Put it all together, and the increase in salience and small increase in Bush preference for foreign policy constitutes a gain of 13.5 percentage points in the Bush vote in 2004.

Obviously, he didn’t win by that much. He lost ground on economic issues, because of the recession. But without his edge on war on terrorism, Bush would have lost. And that proposition?unlike the “it’s all about gay marriage meme”?is testable and fits the available data. Voters worried about partial-birth abortion, same-sex marriage, and other cultural issues are obviously an important constituency within the current GOP majority, but they are no more responsible for Bush’s national victory on Tuesday than voters motivated by other issues to re-elect the president.

John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a public policy think tank in North Carolina, and a syndicated columnist and radio host.