I'm slowly making my way through Franken's
The Truth with Jokes and he mentioned a study by Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III, two MIT professors, whose analysis of the 2004 presidential election concluded that the gay marriage initiative actually benefitted Kerry with a backlash vote. As I understand it the gay marriage issue has as much support as Bush's mandate - it is how the GOP is spinning it not reality.
Truth in Numbers
Moral values and the gay-marriage backlash did not help Bush
Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III
8 The 2004 presidential election has been termed the “values election.” In one widely discussed exit poll, the plurality of voters (22 percent) ranked “moral values” at the top of their list of concerns, and of that group 80 percent voted for George Bush. In addition, 11 states passed ballot questions that wrote bans on gay marriage into state constitutions. These referenda, according to some analysts, galvanized the Christian right, mobilizing voters who might otherwise have stayed at home. They came to the polls to strike a blow for traditional values, and they cast their ballots for George Bush while they were at it. Were this line of reasoning correct, John Kerry’s defeat could be laid directly at the feet of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who authored the court’s decision legalizing gay marriage in the state.
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Consider the case of Ohio: John Kerry lost Ohio, a state with a ballot initiative and substantial efforts by the Christian right to mobilize voters. But Kerry won a greater percentage of the vote than Gore had (48.9 percent rather than 48.2 percent). Indeed, Bush lost vote share in each of the three battleground states with gay-marriage bans on the ballot, falling from 49.7 percent of the overall two-party vote in these states in 2000 to 49.6 percent in 2004. In contrast, Bush gained vote share in the battleground states that did not vote on gay marriage: in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Bush’s combined 50.4 percent of the vote represented a one-percentage-point increase since 2000.
At the state level, then, marriage referenda seem not to have worked to Bush’s advantage. If we move down to the county level, we find even firmer support for this conclusion. In states with gay marriage on the ballot, Bush gained additional support in the counties he carried in 2000. But in these same states he also lost votes in Democratic counties generally and—perhaps more surprisingly—in evenly divided counties. The overall result is that the polarization of the electorate over gay marriage aided Kerry, not Bush.
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The interpretation of Bush’s 2004 victory will surely shape the agenda of his second term. Many commentators have described the election as a triumph of the Christian right, which rallied around “moral values” using the threat of gay marriage as a catalyst. This interpretation, if it takes hold, will embolden those on the right within the Bush administration. It will also lead Democrats in the wrong direction as they respond to their loss. John Kerry’s running mate, Senator John Edwards, has already commented that “voters have to believe that our values—my values and the values of other Democratic leaders—are the same values they believe in.” The evidence shows that the Republican victory rests more on fear of terrorism and an election-year uptick in the economy than on the activism of the party’s right wing. Responding to the tangible worries of the vast middle of the political spectrum rather than a polarizing moral agenda should be the basis of Democratic strategy over the next four years.
Stephen Ansolabehere is a professor of political science at MIT and the co-author of The Media Game and Going Negative.
Charles Stewart III is a professor of political science at MIT and the author of Budget Reform Politics.
Originally published in the February/March 2005 issue of Boston Review
source:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR30.1/ansolastewart.html