[lbo-talk] 22% Moral Values support as an artifact of a forced choice question

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Nov 6 21:34:33 PST 2004


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



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