When Richard Nixon ran for re-election in 1972, his campaign focused on the three ‘A’s: amnesty, acid and abortion. Against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam and social upheaval at home, Nixon appealed to traditionally Democrat, white, working-class voters by making clear his opposition to drug use, abortion and the granting of an amnesty to young men who had avoided military service in Vietnam by fleeing the US. The three ‘A’s were, moreover, simply metaphors for those social issues – law and order, ‘traditional values’, patriotism, race and taxes – which had, since the 1960s, been dividing the Democratic party’s core supporters.
The role of ‘moral values’ in winning President Bush re-election this year is thus not as novel (nor as clear-cut) as some of the commentary following the election has suggested. In fact, Bush has simply taken out and dusted down the traditional Republican playbook and followed the instructions.
Tried and tested in the cold war era, it melded the charge that the Democrats were weak on national security with a wider critique that accused liberals of being out-of-touch with the social and cultural values of the ‘silent majority’. The tactics worked a treat, delivering millions of white working-class voters to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr.
With the socially moderate Bill Clinton nominated by the Democrats in 1992, the cold war over and national security slipping in political salience, and the economy struggling out of a deep recession, Bush Snr found himself fighting for a second term on a rather unfamiliar electoral battleground. Bush lost the election as the Democrats found a way to neutralise the Republicans’ advantages and concentrate voters’ minds on the economy.
This year, however, George Bush Jnr managed to revive the kind of social issues which had worked so well for his Republican predecessors, ensuring that the election was neither fought on the patchy performance of the US economy since he became president or, indeed, on his record more generally (which, his low approval ratings suggest, did not meet with widespread enthusiasm among large numbers of voters). It appears testament to the president’s political skills, therefore, that exit polls found that 22 per cent of voters chose ‘moral values’ as the most important issue in the election and 80 per cent of them voted for George Bush.
It is certainly true that moral and cultural issues – gay marriage, abortion, gun control – did play a role in Bush’s victory. A post-election survey by Democrat pollsters Democracy Corps found that among ‘Bush waverers’ – key swing voters who backed the president in 2000, seriously considered voting for John Kerry but then ended up voting Republican again this year – cultural doubts about the Democratic candidate far outweighed any other.
But there are a number of factors that question both whether moral values alone were critical in swinging the election to Bush and whether their high salience was inevitable.
The ‘Bush waverers’ surveyed by Democracy Corps, for instance, harboured serious doubts about the president’s record on the economy and healthcare, and were supportive of Kerry’s positions. The late shift of these voters – concentrated among white rural dwellers; older, white working-class people; and white pensioners – back to the president reflected the Republicans’ success in focusing the election debate in the closing days of the campaign on moral values and security, and the Democrats’ failure to concentrate it on the economy. As Democracy Corps suggested: ‘Bush asked people to vote their beliefs and feelings, rather than to judge his performance or ideas for the future.’
The idea that ‘moral values’ alone were responsible for Bush’s re-election also ignores two critical facts. First, ‘values’ issues have long been picked by voters in post-election surveys. In 1992, for instance, the number of voters citing abortion and family values as the determinant of their vote was 27 per cent. In 1996 and 2000, ‘moral values’ also appeared to be as salient as this year.
The referenda banning gay marriage that appeared on the ballots in eleven states (and which are widely credited with mobilising social conservatives to turn out and vote) also appear to have done little to boost Bush’s vote in those states. Indeed, two of the three swing states in which there were referenda were carried by Kerry, and in eight of the eleven, the increase in the president’ share of the vote compared with 2000 lagged behind the increase in his share of the national vote.
Second, the social attitudes of American voters do not appear to have swung markedly to the right, compared with four years ago. Fifty-five per cent of voters, for instance, believe that abortion should be always or mostly legal. And, while only one-quarter of voters indicated support for gay marriage, a further 35 per cent said they supported civil unions. It’s too easy, therefore, to read ‘moral values’ as simply shorthand for social conservatism. It also appears to be an indicator of certain character traits – trust, strength and steadfastness – which voters were looking for in
their commander-in-chief.
The Democracy Corps survey of ‘Bush waverers’ also found that concerns about Kerry’s supposed cultural liberalism were complemented by other doubts: about Kerry’s character (the perception that he was, as the Republicans charged, ‘a flip-flopper’) and worries that he was weak on national security, specifically that he had failed to maintain a consistent position on Iraq and was ‘too risky’ with the threat of terrorism.
Other surveys, too, suggest that national security was at least as important in the election as ‘moral values’, if not more so. Thus, while 49 per cent of voters said they trusted Bush, not Kerry, to handle terrorism, only 31 per cent said they preferred the Democrat. This 18-point gap, believes Professor Paul Freedman of the University of Virginia, is especially significant because ‘terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 per cent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 per cent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him.’ The number of voters choosing terrorism as the most important issue was, at 19 per cent, two per cent less than moral values, but these voters gave 86 per cent of their votes to Bush: a higher proportion than ‘values voters’.
As the Democratic Leadership Council has argued, Democrats failed in this election, as they have done in the past, to convince many voters that the party shares their values and will defend their country. The mistake, however, would be to believe that all this requires is some move to the right on certain discrete issues: moderating, or downplaying, previous positions. The task before them is, in fact, both more radical and progressive: to see the language of values as the means to animate, explain and advance the centre-left’s agenda. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton showed how this could be done, putting the case for fiscal discipline, investment in education and training, tackling crime and welfare reform by placing them in the context of broader themes: work, opportunity, responsibility and community. The Democrats could do worse than to take a leaf out of his book.