Slate: The Gay Marriage Myth: Terrorism, not 'values', decided election

[fiorello]

From an on-air interview: Bush's share of the vote did NOT increase relative to 2000 among voters who are regular churchgoers. It increased among voters who are intermittant or occasional churchgoers.

Also, Bush's vote relative to 2000 did NOT change in states that had gay marriage referenda.

From the on-line article (by Paul Freedman:

Gay marriage and values didn't decide this election. Terrorism did.
....
Voters who cited moral issues as most important did give their votes overwhelmingly to Bush (80 percent to 18 percent), and states where voters saw moral issues as important were more likely to be red ones. But these differences were no greater in 2004 than in 2000. If you're trying to explain why the president's vote share in 2004 is bigger than his vote share in 2000, values don't help.

If the morality gap doesn't explain Bush's re-election, what does? A good part of the answer lies in the terrorism gap. Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry.

These differences hold up at the state level even when each state's past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.

http://www.slate.com/id/2109275/

[rockymountaindem]

1. So basically we won on every issue except this one.

And we only lost on this one because of the fear card. Now two things can happen. There will be no terrorist attacks and people won't rate this issue as highly next time, or there will be a terrorist attack and Bush will be unable to blame anyone but himself for not stopping it (although he'll try).

I'm feeling great about 2008. We'll have the issues on our side as well as people's desire for a split government and their love of change (people want the party in the WH to change somewhat regularly).