Since my post yesterday regarding exit poll breakdowns by size of place, I've spent more time looking at the subgroups relative to 2000, and I think I can now say with some confidence that the dominant spin about values is basically wrong, though I'm still coming up short on alternative explanations. Let's start with the former:
First, in today's New York Times, ABC news pollster Gary Langer takes on the original exit poll question, noting that it
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.
Next, Alan Abramowitz analyzes the data on church attendance and finds that there's no appreciable difference in the percentage of voters claiming to attend church regularly, or in the percentage by which they voted for Bush. On the contrary, "between 2000 and 2004, President Bush's largest gains occurred among less religious voters, not among more religious voters."
The latter point, as well as my original one, is also made by Philip Klinkner (via Mathew Gross, who also linked to me!), but even more interesting is the data he points to on income. Turns out that Bush gained serious ground among higher-income voters (which expanded as a portion of the electorate), while Kerry made (very minor) gains among working-class ones ($15k-$50k per year).
Wow! Combine that with the data on losing voters in urban areas, and a picture starts to emerge: more affluent and cosmpolitan voters swung to Bush, right?
Well, let's go back to the exit poll data, this time by education. It turns out that voters with college or post-graduate degrees didn't shift from 2000, but voters with high-school diplomas or some-college education shifted slightly (+3%) towards Bush (I suspect that the numbers on voters without high-school education, who are only 4% of the electorate aren't statistically reliable).
So perhaps the determining swing group in this election was affluent, urban, less-educated voters who don't regularly go to church. Or perhaps we're dealing with complex election results which we shouldn't be hastily drawing simple conclusions about.
For now, I'm going with the latter. In the meantime, I'm re-reading Klinkner's fantastic paper on "Court vs. Country" and why the Democrats lost Congress in the first place.
Posted by Michael at November 6, 2004 06:50 PM | TrackBack