UNDECLARED DETENTE IN THE CULTURE WARS: From the San Francisco Chronicle

Almost from the moment same-sex couples started lining up to get married at city halls from San Francisco to New Paltz, N.Y., experts predicted "cultural values" would play a dominant role in the presidential race.

In one of the surprises of the campaign, it has not turned out that way.

As the debates demonstrated, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry have reserved their greatest passion, and bile, for such issues as the war in Iraq, jobs and health care. The candidates have, if anything, tried to gloss over questions about abortion and same-sex marriage, the source of caustic battles in the past, or they have simply changed the subject.

On the stump, the issues barely come up. Clashes over the war in Iraq, in particular, appear to have crowded out much of the debate over the values issues.

"We were just wrong," said John Zogby, the head of Zogby International, an independent polling organization that had found great interest among voters earlier this year in the issues that separate liberals and conservatives in the "culture wars." "These were the wedge issues, and we expected to hear more about them." ...

The trick politically, Newport said, is when to raise the issues. For the most part, the Republicans are using them to mobilize right-wing voters and get them to turn out on election day, but they avoid the issues when trying to appeal to swing voters.

"The people who really care about these values issues have decided already," Newport said.

In fact, said Newport, one of the most important shifts in voter behavior in recent years has been what he calls religiosity -- the growing number of voters who cast their ballots based on religious conviction rather than traditional socioeconomic factors.

"If I were to go out on the street and ask one thing as the predictor of voter behavior, it would be how often they go to church," said Newport, who added that almost invariably, regular churchgoers vote for conservatives.

In his recent book, "The Values Divide: American Politics and Culture in Transition," John Kenneth White, a professor of politics at Catholic University in Washington, says that, hidden or not, religious conviction is the pivot around which voting patterns turn today.

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posted by Eve at 3:22 PM VOTE

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