Your religious fanatics/homophobes theory seems to be falling
apart. Poorly worded exit polling questions & voting patterns
prove your theories wrong.
THIS IS ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK
Cori Dauber
Last night I wrote that "moral values" had to be the most poorly worded polling question in history. Today in the Times, one of the pollsters on the committee what produced the exit poll -- the one who tried to talk the committee out of using the question -- explains [edit: see the post below] why he opposed using the question, and why it's distorting analysis of the election now. I really believe, given some of the post-mortems I've seen, and what they mean for where the Democratic party goes from here (and what they mean for the type of civic -- and civil -- discourse we see in the next few years) that this piece is one of the most important you'll read on the election.
You know, I'm no polling expert, and I don't try to pass myself off as one, but I hang out with enough of them to have picked up a few things. And just from the little I know, it was immediately clear that the conclusions people were jumping to based on the "moral values" question were asking that result to bear a weight it just couldn't hold. Aside from the obvious (that "moral values" could have meant Kerry's values, as a characteristic of leadership) the interpretations also presumed that every voter was a single issue voter, but the poll never asked people if they voted only on the basis of the issue "most important to you."
I'll go back to something I've raised before -- given how reliant political reporters in particular are on polls, how well trained are they in polling and the use of polls?
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.
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