After a campaign dominated by discussions on terrorism, war, employment, health care, and Social Security, the National Election Pool’s exit polls threw everyone a curve ball. What was the number one issue cited by voters as the most important issue of the campaign? “Moral values” came in first with 22%, followed by the economy (20%), terrorism (19%), and Iraq (15%).
This was immediately interpreted as a sign that the campaigns and the media had missed the boat. Everyone was so busy focusing on the global instability and unusually weak job growth that we didn’t recognize that Americans’ real concern is, as Jon Stewart put it, “two dudes kissing.”
Fortunately, the push-back against the exit poll’s conclusion is in full swing. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that no one should believe the “moral values” hype generated by the data. Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News, for example, explained over the weekend that a “poorly devised exit poll question and a dose of spin are threatening to undermine our understanding of the 2004 presidential election.”
[The exit polls] asked voters what was the most important issue in their decision: taxes, education, Iraq, terrorism, economy/jobs, moral values or health care. Six of these are concrete, specific issues. The seventh, moral values, is not, and its presence on the list produced a misleading result.
How do we know? Pre-election polls consistently found that voters were most concerned about three issues: Iraq, the economy and terrorism. When telephone surveys asked an open-ended issues question (impossible on an exit poll), answers that could sensibly be categorized as moral values were in the low single digits. In the exit poll, they drew 22 percent.
Why the jump? One reason is that the phrase means different things to people. Moral values is a grab bag; it may appeal to people who oppose abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research but, because it’s so broadly defined, it pulls in others as well. Fifteen percent of non-churchgoers picked it, as did 12 percent of liberals.
Look, too, at the other options on the list. Four of them played to John Kerry’s strengths: economy/jobs, health care, education, Iraq. Just two worked in President Bush’s favor: terrorism and taxes. If you were a Bush supporter, and terrorism and taxes didn’t inspire you, moral values was your place to go on the exit poll questionnaire. People who picked it voted for him by 80 percent to 18 percent.
“Moral values” is a loaded, ambiguous phrase that offers little information in this context.
The University of Virginia’s Paul Freedman fleshed this out further in a piece for Slate, comparing this year’s results to 2000’s.
[T]he 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.
The religious right is taking inordinate credit for electing Bush, and will continue to do so, based exclusively on the answer to that exit poll question. Likewise, GOP lawmakers are insisting that a culture-war domestic agenda will simply be responding to popular demand.
They’ll all be wrong.