'Redneck vote' is a liberal myth
'Redneck vote' is a liberal myth
By Charles Krauthammer.
In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained a USA Today headline: "Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP." Overnight, the revolt of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom.
At the time, I looked into this story line and found not a scintilla of evidence to support it. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory.
Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.
In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."
Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest? Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for President?"
It is a thin reed upon which to base a general theory of the '04 election. The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values is sure to get a bare plurality over the others.
Look at the choices: education 4%, taxes 5%, health care 8%, Iraq 15%, terrorism 19%, economy and jobs, 20%, moral values 22%. "Moral values" encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war.
The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: "war issues" or "foreign policy issues" and "economic issues."
If you pit group against group, moral values comes in dead last: war issues at 34%, economic issues at 33% and moral values at 22%.
And we know that this is the real ranking. After all, the exit poll is just a single poll. We had dozens of polls in the runup to the election that showed that the chief concerns were the war on terror, the war in Iraq and the economy.
Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. This is more nonsense. Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1% nationwide. In Ohio, the increase was 1% - less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.
This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals and from infecting the blue-state media. So once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat.
Originally published on November 12, 2004