If 2000 felt like being robbed, this felt like a mugging. Don’t get me wrong, United States George Bush won fair and square, by a greater margin in the popular vote than Ronald Reagan did in 1984. But by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Democrats up and down the country were suffering from delusions of imminent victory.
Friendly journalists surreptitiously leaked preliminary exit polling numbers taken in the early afternoon that presaged a momentous Kerry win. Voter News Service surveys had Kerry significantly ahead in Florida and Ohio, but they were just plain wrong. So when it slowly dawned on us that there would be no celebration, it was a sucker punch. Defeat had never tasted so bitter.
So who were the millions turning out for Bush? The final exit polls defined it loud and clear. When asked which issue mattered most, the most repeated response wasn’t terrorism, it wasn’t Iraq, it wasn’t the economy; it was moral values. The new block that emerged Tuesday night was the ”values voter”.
Over one-fifth of everyone who voted was a self-described evangelical.
Evangelicals have been around in US politics for decades, but this year they really came of age as a decisive factor. Bush won their vote by a crushing margin, and they turned out for him in greater numbers than ever before. Democrats saw this coming but they weren’t prepared for the intensity.
One thing that brought evangelicals out in force was an amendment to ban gay marriage. Kerry did better in all the battleground states where marriage amendments weren’t on the ballot. It was in Ohio, and that alone could have been the difference.
More telling for Kerry was the breakdown of votes by any kind of church attendance, evangelical or otherwise. The more often a voter attends church the more likely he was to support Bush. Bush trounced Kerry among regular churchgoers, edged Kerry among monthly churchgoers. Kerry led Bush among people who rarely go to church and was way ahead among those who never go to church.
In a country with so many believers, (80% of this year’s voters said they attended church) this is a huge problem. Kerry simply wasn’t communicating to a massive slice of the electorate, the hard core of which gets its political information not from the TV news, but from the pulpit.
Not all Christian churchgoers are hardcore evangelicals, but it’s clear that Kerry did not appeal to any of them. Just as Bush wore his religion on his sleeve, so Kerry wore his irreligiousness on his. Kerry thought that referring to his upbringing as a Catholic altar boy would be sufficient. It only made it clear that religion was a vestige of his upbringing without relevance to his current life.
The few times that Kerry attended Southern Baptist churches on the campaign trail, he looked like a tourist in Harlem. The services appeared to pique his interest as they would an anthropologist. He was never an actual participant.
The next Democratic nominee doesn’t have to be a devout ”born again”, but he or she will have to feel comfortable on the inside of a church. The next nominee cannot afford to alienate worshipping voters, and must find a way to talk about common values.
The evangelical right does not have a monopoly on this conversation. All voters irrespective of religious ideology were looking for moral clarity in this election. Whether you agree with him or not, Bush radiated it. Kerry — with his multiple positions on Iraq — simply did not.
As Democrats figure out how to appeal to the ”values voter” they need to absorb this lesson.
Philip James is a former senior Democratic party strategist. – Guardian Unlimited Â