It's The Fags, Stupid

Swing State Project alerted me to the fact Pew released a new report on Thursday on various aspects of why people voted as they did.  Curiously, my favorite "moderates", Jeff Jarvis and Michael Totten, have not mentioned it.

The Pew report says that the most important reason that people voted for Bush was moral values.1  The Bush voters who said moral values were important define that term to mean opposition to gay marriage, followed closely by abortion. 

Both Jarvis and Totten have been spinning hard to explain away the "values" vote. (See here, here,  here, and here, here, and here, for examples.) Both of them criticized Kerry strongly during the campaign for being weak on terrorism but don't want to be lumped in with the bigot crowd.  (Totten voted for Bush; Jarvis voted for Kerry, he says, but he damned him with faint praise, calling him "a dreadful candidate". Bush, notably, did not come in for such criticism.)2

As I have said before, the Republicans have concocted a powerful brew of uber-patriotism and religiously-based intolerance.   In this particular election, they began with the broth of calling Kerry a lying flip-flopper who had betrayed his fellow soldiers in Vietnam.  Those attacks were against his defense credentials, where Kerry the veteran was strong.  They repeated that mantra over and over again.  Then, into that mix, they dropped the catalysts: Kerry would give control over our safety to foreigners, and gay marriage.  Those two things allowed the poisonous mix - from which both Totten and Jarvis had drunk deeply - to crystallize around specific events that people viscerally hated.  Going into the voting booth on election day, voters could then feel on a deep level that Kerry was immoral, and that immorality could be the undoing of the country, both on a military and a cultural level.  Therefore, they voted against Kerry.3

The Pew report shows that people who vote for Republicans hate gays and hate abortion, and voted for the guy who they think will stop both.  By successfully melding attacks on patriotism and attacks on social issues into one larger attack on morality, the Republicans have increased the power of the moral values attack line against Democrats.4  It has worked for them, and it is working for them, so we can expect them to continue doing it.  Jarvis and Totten have thrown their lot in with such people, as did anyone else who voted for Bush.  You can stop spinning now.

1 - There is a difference in the results when you ask the question with a list of possible answers or open-ended.  When you ask it with a list of possible answers, "moral values" gets 44% from Republicans, versus 27% when you ask the open-ended question.   However, with the fixed-list question, the response "other" gets 5% from Bushies, while on the open-ended question "other" gets 34%.  In contrast, Bush voters gave terrorism 24% on the fixed-list question and 17% on the open-ended question, a far lower swing than the moral values response.  I think the responses show the same result; it's just on the open-ended question people couldn't put a word to what they wanted to express. 

2 - Incidentally, the Pew report shows that two-thirds of voters were satisfied with the choice of candidates, something else Jarvis got wrong.

3 - Significantly, the most common emotion reported by Bush voters - 90% of them - after the election is "relieved."  Specifically, I believe, they are relieved of the fear of a victory by the immoral Kerry.   

4 - Please note that I am not blaming gay and lesbian people, or the Democratic party's support for their rights (as lame as it was, it did exist).  I am proud Democrats stood up for equal rights for all Americans.  And as a practical matter, abandoning gay and lesbian rights wouldn't help; the Republicans would just create another hot-button issue to press.

Comments

[eRobin]

I heard on Fresh Air that a law supporting gay marriage failed in France but that a subsequent law that allowed the benefits of marriage to any manner of couple passed. So a mother/daughter couple could file as could a gay couple. I guess brothers and sisters can as well. It's a purely civil contract that assumes nothing about sex. I thought that was interesting.

Do you think something like that would work here? My first response is to say never because the anti-gay marriage/anti-civil unions crowd used those kinds of relationship as scary examples of the bottom of the slippery slope - but maybe this is what it would take. I don't know. I know that "marriage" has to be out of the message though.

[mark safranski]

Hey Mithras

The problem with the "Moral Values" explanation is when you combine Iraq and Terror categories, which easily fit under a different rubric like national security or war, it's easily the most imortant category by a fair margin.

Kerry lost moderate Democrats and Independents on the war issue ( albeit moderates and independents for whom abortion was not an overriding issue, my guess is they are blue collar white and hispanic males and catholics- but that's just a guess). Not all Republican voters- as opposed to self-described religious conservatives- are either anti-gay or pro-life but those are lukewarm issues for them compared to the war or in most normal election years, the economy.

Interestingly, Bush's support among hard-core, born-again, evangelicals went down slightly from 2000, not up, even as quite a few new socially-conservative voters went to the polls. Some of the purists must have stayed home on his statement on civil unions.

[Mithras]

The President's top advisors seem to disagree with you, Mark. They think the values issues are very important. Do you know better?

Anyway, what I am saying is that the Republican party has successfully joined social issues and security issues into the enhanced morality attack - viz, an immoral Democratic party is weak and degenerate, and thus cannot or will not defend the nation's security and traditions. So, Bush voters who report that Iraq/war/security/terrorism was their top issue are still responding to that enhanced critique.

[mark safranski]

Ironically, Kevin Drum blogged on the point I was trying to make earlier today:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005158.php

Do I know better than Karl Rove ? Fair question. In terms of electing a president and running a campaign, no, certainly not. On the other hand, I'm a pretty fair analyst of evidence and this is what I see:

*Karl Rove is unlikely to tell the media ( and the president's opponents) his actual strategy as opposed to what he'd like them to believe is his strategy.

* Karl Rove delegates all the direct contact duties with the born-agains to a key aide because he himself is not one of them ( and if he was he'd have designed a strategy that would have sent the GOP down in flames) and these ppl live to implement bizarre litmus tests.

* If the religious right agenda was ever enacted in it's true-believer, Tom Coburn fashion - outlawing abortion for example - the Republican Party would face electoral disaster in the next election. Rove has probably a fairly precise figure on how many millions of GOP women alone would be lost.

* The religious right's crazy obsessions provoke a similar frenzied response on the other side of the spectrum which makes it a marvelous distractor to get real priorities accomplished while everyone is consumed with nonsense like a jackass mayor "marrying" people in his office.

* If you don't keep the religious right occupied with something to do, they will, if left to their own devices, start scrutinizing Republicans with a microscope for all kinds of perceived " betrayals" with the same manic outrage they normally heap on liberals. This is a tactic Democratic leaders really ought to try with their own crazies. Keep them busy, make them happy for winning points on nonsense* and keep them away from sharp objects where they can damage the party.

* Clinton did something similar using personnel appointments to appease the wackier Leftists but kept a fairly tight rein on policy proposals so they ran middle of the road.

[Mithras]

Funny you cite Drum for your proposition. He says that 5% of former moderates decided they are conservatives since the last election, and that although the driving force behind that switch was 9/11 and national security, those people are likely to adopt conservative positions on a whole host of other issues. So, he and I agree on the "what"; I am offering another explanation of the "why." Namely, Republicans offered a compelling story that mixed national security and social issues into a "moral values" argument that resonated with the fearful, hateful feelings of Bush voters.

You're right that Rove would absolutely not share his full thoughts on politics with the media. He sees every press interaction as a propaganda moment. But is he lying in this instance? I don't think so; I think the moral values issue works for the GOP, so he's hammering it.

Whether the social conservative program gets enacted in its pure form is a strategic question. Lots of liberals hope the right overreaches, but it's just a hope, and the right has not been very dumb the last 4 years with overreaching. (They were dumb in the 90s. One thing you gotta say about these guys, they learn from their mistakes, which is not to say they abandon their goals.) The far right understands that it's a process, and half a loaf (for now) is better than nothing.

They'll get further bans on abortion procedures, but they won't overturn Roe for another few years. They'll ban same-sex marriage and civil unions and private contractual arrangements between gay and lesbian people across the country, but they won't get a constitutional amendment yet. They'll further drive up the national debt in order to increase the likelihood of the budgetary train wreck that will finally dismantle social security and medicare and medicaid. They'll get more money spent on the military and the faith-based programs. And they'll get to pack the bench with impunity. And there is absolutely nothing anyone will do about it.