Moral Issues and Voter Decision Making in the 2004 Presidential Election

Although the 2004 presidential election was predicted to be razor close, Republican President George W. Bush became the first candidate to win a majority of the popular vote since his father in 1988. Bush’s coattails extended to the U.S. Congress as well, with Republican gains in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Journalists and pundits immediately attributed Republican success to the now ubiquitous “values voters” explanation—voters supported Bush because they shared his socially conservative values. Bush had emphasized his Christian faith throughout the campaign, and a widely reported exit poll found that voters thought “morals” were the most important problem facing the nation. The success of gay marriage bans in 11 states seemed to further affirm the prominence of moral values in voters’ decision making. With these indicators suggesting that value issues, like gay marriage and abortion, were the catalyst behind President Bush’s re-election, it seemed that the president rode to victory on a wave of values voters who had all but escaped the notice of even the most careful political observers until Election Day. Surprisingly, the role of the economy, the war in Iraq, and a host of other plausible interpretations of the 2004 presidential election received comparatively little attention in the national media— where analysts seemed almost unanimously preoccupied with moral values. Tucker Carlson, then co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, concluded on November 5, 2004, “Three days after the presidential election, it is clear that it was not the war on terror, but the issue of what we’re calling moral values that drove President Bush and other Republicans to victory this week.” In this manuscript, we examine voter decision making in the 2004 presidential race, evaluating the influence of the “moral issues” of gay marriage and abortion on individual vote choice relative to competing factors such by D. Sunshine Hillygus, Harvard University Todd G. Shields, University of Arkansas as party identification, retrospective evaluations of the economy, and the Iraq war. Using a new national post-election survey, we find that opinions about gay marriage and abortion were far from the most important predictors of vote choice, and had no effect on voter decision making among Independents, respondents in battleground states, or even among respondents in states with an anti-gay marriage initiative on the ballot. Rather, only in the South did either issue have an independent effect on vote choice, and even here the effect was minimal in comparison to that of attitudes toward the economy, the Iraq war, and terrorism.