| James N. Markels | ||||
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by
James N. Markels At
first, Kerry supporters were giddy as Election Day started.
Exit polls were in Kerry’s favor, long lines were reported at
election stations across the country, and the last few national polls
showed a definite trend in Kerry’s direction.
The presidency seemed practically in Kerry’s hands.
And
then, everything went wrong. Not
only did Bush win, despite being targeted by numerous movies, books, op-eds,
websites, 527 organizations, and everything else that could be thrown at
him, but he won convincingly. He
was the first candidate in 16 years to win a majority of the votes cast.
Stunned Democrats have been left to wonder how he did it.
Who, or what, is to blame? One
early culprit was gay marriage. Eleven
states, including the swing state of Ohio, had on their ballots state
constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage.
It was supposed that the conservative base turned out strongly to
support these amendments, resulting in additional votes for Bush that
handed him Ohio and, thus, the election. But
the numbers don’t show this to be the case.
Compared with his showing in 2000, Bush did not improve his stake
significantly in states with gay marriage amendments as compared with
those without. In Ohio, for example, Bush increased his share of the
state’s vote by one percent since 2000, while he increased his share
by three percent nationally. The
voters in the swing state of Oregon approved a ban on gay marriage but
still handed the state rather comfortably to Kerry.
Whatever gay marriage’s effect on the election, it was not big
enough to be significant. Others
think that Bush was very successful in turning out the evangelical vote
across the board, energizing his base as it were, and that carried him
over the top. Voters indicated that moral values were the single most
important issue behind their vote at 22 percent, and the vast majority
of those votes went to Bush. On
the other hand, Bush increased his share of votes from almost every
voting constituency there is compared to his share in 2000.
According to The Political Junkie Handbook, the only
groups where Bush lost ground were gays, 18-29 year-olds, and
Protestants. Bush pulled in
higher percentages of blacks (three percent), union members (three
percent), Jews (six percent), registered Democrats (one percent), and
women (five percent)—all groups that are considered Democratic turf.
Bush also increased his numbers among the less-regular
churchgoers by more than he did for the regular churchgoers.
His appeal clearly reached beyond the evangelical set. In
addition, while moral values were the single biggest issue, that
doesn’t mean that moral values dominated voter thinking.
National security as a whole, taken by combining the issues of
terrorism and Iraq, was considered most important by 34 percent of
voters, and economic issues as a whole (combining taxes, jobs, deficits,
etc.) concerned 25 percent of voters.
This was not a “moral issues” election; the bread and butter
issues of security and the economy still drove the vote. Yet
it wasn’t the “security vote” that did it entirely, either.
Former president Bill Clinton recently argued in a speech that
the surfacing of the bin Laden tape right before the election made
voters not want to change horses in midstream.
Paul Freedman over at Slate argued that Bush’s 18-point
advantage over Kerry on trust in dealing with terrorism was the key to
the election. But there’s
a gap between having an advantage on an issue and actually turning out
voters to vote for you based on that issue.
No,
what I think really did it this time around was that the Democrats in
2004 made the same mistake the Republicans did in 1996: they let their
hatred of the incumbent overcome their ability to craft a coherent and
appealing message to voters. Like
I said in my last piece for Brainwash, voters will take something over
nothing, even if the something isn’t all that great.
The Democrats leaned heavily on the “anyone but Bush”
contingent, but failed to give moderate voters a real reason to vote for
Kerry. Voters
generally see through the rhetoric, and they know when the animosity is
going over the deep end. In
1996, voters saw Republicans seething over Clinton’s presidency and
felt more turned off by that than they did over Clinton himself.
The same happened this election.
Between Michael Moore’s polemics, the Air America diatribes,
and the endless stream of celebrities and musicians denouncing the
president, voters across the board decided to go elsewhere, as if to
punish the hyper-partisanship. The
result was a mandate for the Republicans.
Oh, sure, Democratic loyalists will argue that 51 percent of the
popular vote isn’t a mandate, or that Kerry got more votes than any
other presidential candidate in history except for Bush. But
the fact remains that when the Democrats pulled out all the stops, they
lost by more than before. Their
fervor only made things worse. The
Republicans learned their lesson after Clinton; the question is, will
the Democrats? |
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