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Saturday, November 06, 2004

The danger of moving closer to the cultural right
Posted by Jill | 8:06 AM
Paul Freedman in Slate shoots down the myth that "moral values" (whatever those mean in a First Family whose Newsweek photo revealed two underage drinking arrests, one drunk driving arrest, one uncharged vehicular homicide, numerous extramarital affairs, and of course, the poster boy for "moral values", first brother Neil Bush) decided the election.

You know as well as I do that Al From and Terry McAuliffe and Bob Shrum and the other Losers of Liberalism who should be tossed out on their ears YESTERDAY are already talking about how the Democrats can get the kind of fundamentalist Christians who regard the Bible as truth to vote for us. Guess what, guys, they aren't going to. Period. So, as the Big Dawg said at Tom Harkin's big steak fry (or whatever the heck Harkin's big annual Donkey Bash is called) last year: "When you find yourself in a hole, STOP DIGGING!"

Freedman redeems Microcantaddtwoandtwo's online rag for a day at least, by noting that the "Killer Homsexuals are coming to get you! Liberals want to take all your money!" Chicken Littles aren't as big a factor as we thought:

The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small. Based on preliminary turnout estimates, 59.5 percent of the eligible voting population turned out in marriage-ban states, whereas 59.1 percent turned out elsewhere. This is a microscopic gap when compared to other factors. For example, turnout in battleground states was more than 7.5 points higher than it was in less-competitive states, and it increased much more over 2000 as well.

It's true that states with bans on the ballot voted for Bush at higher rates than other states. His vote share averaged 7 points higher in gay-marriage-banning states than in other states (57.9 vs. 50.9). But four years ago, when same-sex marriage was but a twinkle in the eye of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Bush's vote share was 7.3 points higher in these same states than in other states. In other words, by a statistically insignificant margin, putting gay marriage on the ballot actually reduced the degree to which Bush's vote share in the affected states exceeded his vote share elsewhere.

Why did states with gay-marriage ballot measures vote so heavily for Bush? Because such measures don't appear on state ballots randomly. Opponents of gay marriage concentrate their efforts in states that are most hospitable to a ban and are most likely to vote for Bush even without such a ballot measure. A state's history of voting for Bush is more likely to lead to an anti-gay-marriage measure on that state's ballot than the other way around.

Much has been made of the fact that "moral values" topped the list of voters' concerns, mentioned by more than a fifth (22 percent) of all exit-poll respondents as the "most important issue" of the election. It's true that by four percentage points, people in states where gay marriage was on the ballot were more likely than people elsewhere to mention moral issues as a top priority (25.0 vs. 20.9 percent). But again, the causality is unclear. Did people in these states mention moral issues because gay marriage was on the ballot? Or was it on the ballot in places where people were already more likely to be concerned about morality?

More to the point, the morality gap didn't decide the election. Voters who cited moral issues as most important did give their votes overwhelmingly to Bush (80 percent to 18 percent), and states where voters saw moral issues as important were more likely to be red ones. But these differences were no greater in 2004 than in 2000. If you're trying to explain why the president's vote share in 2004 is bigger than his vote share in 2000, values don't help.


So what was it, then? No surprise there:

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.


It's as I originally thought: The Democrats thought that having a war hero who voted for Bush's Iraq clusterfuck would inoculate them against charges of being "soft on terrorism." It didn't. For better or worse, rightly or wrongly, Americans wanted a cowboy-strutting phony who talked the talk, even if he doesn't walk the walk. Like small children who trust Daddy because he's "SO BIG", Americans wanted the kind of black and white answers that would help them delude themselves that they are safe under this Administration.

This is actually good news for the Democrats. Creating a coherent platform on terrorism and defense is a FAR easier task than trying to convince a bunch of flat-earthers that the two gay guys down the block who are out mowing the lawn every Saturday and building a jungle gym for their twins aren't somehow going to put some pagan hocus-pocus on them and render them somehow magically divorced and damned to hellfire eternal.

So now, instead of trying to be phony tough and crazy brave, we can focus on what we do well and what is the right thing to do.: coming up with real, viable solutions to thorny geopolitical struggles, while at the same time fighting for what America stands for in the eyes of our own history and of the rest of the world: ensuring that ALL Americans, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation, have equal protection under the law.
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