URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/opinion/06langer.html
The New York Times November 6, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Question of Values
By GARY LANGER
A poorly devised exit poll question and a dose of spin are threatening
to undermine our understanding of the 2004 presidential election.
The news media has made much of the finding that a fifth of voters
picked "moral values" as the most important issue in deciding their
vote - as many as cited terrorism or the economy. The conclusion:
moral values are ascendant as a political issue.
The reporting accurately represents the exit poll data, but not
reality. While morals and values are critical in informing political
judgments, they represent personal characteristics far more than a
discrete political issue. Conflating the two distorts the story of
Tuesday's election.
This distortion comes from a question in the exit poll, co-sponsored
by the national television networks and The Associated Press, that
asked voters what was the most important issue in their decision:
taxes, education, Iraq, terrorism, economy/jobs, moral values or
health care. Six of these are concrete, specific issues. The seventh,
moral values, is not, and its presence on the list produced a
misleading result.
How do we know? Pre-election polls consistently found that voters were
most concerned about three issues: Iraq, the economy and terrorism.
When telephone surveys asked an open-ended issues question (impossible
on an exit poll), answers that could sensibly be categorized as moral
values were in the low single digits. In the exit poll, they drew 22
percent.
Why the jump? One reason is that the phrase means different things to
people. Moral values is a grab bag; it may appeal to people who oppose
abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research but, because it's so
broadly defined, it pulls in others as well. Fifteen percent of
non-churchgoers picked it, as did 12 percent of liberals.
Look, too, at the other options on the list. Four of them played to
John Kerry's strengths: economy/jobs, health care, education, Iraq.
Just two worked in President Bush's favor: terrorism and taxes. If you
were a Bush supporter, and terrorism and taxes didn't inspire you,
moral values was your place to go on the exit poll questionnaire.
People who picked it voted for him by 80 percent to 18 percent.
Moral values, moreover, is a loaded phrase, something polls should
avoid. (Imagine if "patriotism" were on the list.) It resonates among
conservatives and religious Americans. While 22 percent of all voters
marked moral values as their top issue, 64 percent of religious
conservatives checked it. And among people who said they were mainly
interested in a candidate with strong religious faith (just 8 percent,
in a far more balanced list of candidate attributes), 61 percent
checked moral values as their top issue. So did 42 percent of people
who go to church more than once a week, 41 percent of evangelical
white Christians and 37 percent of conservatives.
The makeup and views of the electorate in other measures provide some
context for the moral values result. The number of conservative white
Protestants or weekly churchgoing white Protestants voting (12 percent
and 13 percent of voters, respectively) did not rise in 2004.
Fifty-five percent of voters said abortion should be legal in all or
most cases. Sixty percent said they supported either gay marriage (25
percent) or civil unions (an additional 35 percent).
Opinion researchers don't always agree. The exit poll is written by a
committee, and that committee voted down my argument against including
"moral values" in the issues list. That happens - and the exit poll
overall did deliver a wealth of invaluable data. The point is not to
argue that moral values, however defined, are not important. They are,
and they should be measured. The intersection of religiosity, ideology
and politics is the staging ground for many of the most riveting
social issues of our day.
The point, instead, is that this hot-button catch phrase had no place
alongside defined political issues on the list of most important
concerns in the 2004 vote. Its presence there created a deep
distortion - one that threatens to misinform the political discourse
for years to come.
Gary Langer is the director of polling for ABC News.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company