"VALUES VOTERS"?: Walter Shapiro

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court helped put George W. Bush in the White House. On Tuesday, Bush again won a presidential election with the aid of a state supreme court. This time, it was the ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in that state that may have been the decisive factor in granting Bush a second term.

At the same time, Ohio handed Bush the narrow victory that gave him an Electoral College majority, voters in the Buckeye State also overwhelmingly approved a ban on gay marriage. The Massachusetts decision in November 2003 provided the political momentum behind the crusade in Ohio to legally define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The Bush campaign directly benefited from the outpouring of social conservatives who supported the anti-gay-marriage amendment to the state constitution known as Issue 1.

"I always try to avoid single-factor analysis," said Ohio Democratic strategist Greg Haas. "But if Issue 1 had not been on the ballot, John Kerry would have won Ohio." ...

Parsley, who presides over a biracial congregation, also noted that 16% of African-American voters in Ohio supported Bush, compared with 11% nationally. Because other polls show that black voters strongly oppose gay marriage, Parsley probably theorized correctly that Issue 1 helped the president gain support among this disproportionately Democratic group. ...

Already there is a new orthodoxy built around the exit-poll finding that more voters (22%) cited "moral values" as the reason for their presidential choice than any other factor. ...

Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, echoed my distress with the exit-poll questionnaires. "They're pretty blunt instruments," she said, "And they take on an undue importance because they're the only numbers out there and they have the patina of science." Bowman pointed out that exit polls conducted by the Los Angeles Times also found that voters picked "moral values" as their top issue choice in 1996 and 2000.

Yes, gay marriage was probably the issue that spelled the difference in hard-fought Ohio. But it is a dangerous leap to go from that one-state theory to the broader conclusion that the 2004 election was a referendum on which candidate better personified "moral values."

more

posted by Eve at 5:24 PM VOTE

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home