15
Nov
Missing the Point
Topic: Politics
Yesterday Rich Lowry at NRO put together a fairly good summary of the ill-informed conventional wisdom that’s taking root about the elections (and this also goes to show that I can agree with a conservative columnist). I’d say the only thing Lowry missed was the conclusion by the punditry that the voters were calling for bipartisanship and no “slash and burn” politics from the Democrats (in particular, I recall Brian Williams on NBC saying this over and over again on election night). The only problem with that assertion is there’s nothing in the exit polls to support it. Instead, the polls show intense frustration with how the Republicans have managed their one-party rule of Washington for the past several years. So much so that, for example, Lincoln Chafee (the moderate Republican Senator from Rhode Island) went down to defeat despite going into the election with a 63% approval rating. Asserting that this somehow translates into a public outcry for bipartisanship is simply a non-sequitur. That is, the public may or may not crave bipartisanship, but its not something you can divine from the exit polls, because they were not asked that question.
This sort of thing isn’t new. The conventional wisdom from the 2004 election was even more wrong. Virtually all the maninstream media pundits then - and still to this day - labeled it the “values” election. You have to go to The Economist - a British news magazine - to learn that interpretation of the exit polls was simply wrong. “Values” actually mattered less in 2004 than in previous elections:
Moreover, that 22% share [of the 2004 electorate that cited moral issues as their top voting concern] is much lower than it was in the two previous presidential elections, in 2000 and 1996. Then, 35% and 40%, respectively, put moral or ethical issues top, and a further 14% and 9% put abortion first, an option that was not given in 2004. Thus, in those two elections, about half the electorate said they voted on moral matters; this time, only a fifth did.
If anything, the thing that sets apart 2004 is the public’s concern about terrorism, which didn’t show up in the polls prior to 9/11 (I haven’t checked, but I’d be surprised if terrorism was even listed as a choice in the polls before 9/11). Since the exit polls only allow voters to name one top issue, the lower percentage of those citing moral issues in 2004 can be attributed to the rise of terrorism as a concern. But since “values” still beat out terrorism and the economy by a few percentage points, the pundits decided that “values” was the new big issue, even though it mattered far less overall than it had in the two prior Presidential election years.
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