Blue Movie - The "morality gap" is becoming the key variable in American politics

The Atlantic Monthly ^ | January/February 2003 | Thomas Byrne Edsall

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The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2003
 

The Agenda

Blue Movie

The "morality gap" is becoming the key variable in American politics

by Thomas Byrne Edsall

arly in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).

It is an axiom of American politics that people vote their pocketbooks, and for seventy years the key political divisions in the United States were indeed economic. The Democratic and Republican Parties were aligned, as a general rule, with different economic interests. Electoral fortunes rose and fell with economic cycles. But over the past several elections a new political configuration has begun to emerge—one that has transformed the composition of the parties and is beginning to alter their relative chances for ballot-box success. What is the force behind this transformation? In a word, sex.

Whereas elections once pitted the party of the working class against the party of Wall Street, they now pit voters who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice. Just after the 2000 election a map showing the percentages of porn movies in the home-video market state by state "bore an eerie resemblance to Tuesday night's results," as Pete du Pont, the former Republican governor of Delaware, put it in a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal Web site. "Mr. Gore carried the areas with the highest percentages [of sex movies in the video market] ... Mr. Bush carried the area[s] with the lowest percentage." (If nothing else, this correlates with Morris and Penn's finding that Democratic voters generally are more likely to look at pornography.)

The 2000 election revealed remnants of the old New Deal alignments: people making $15,000 to $30,000 voted for Gore over Bush by a 13-point margin, according to Voter News Service (VNS) exit polls, while those making more than $100,000 voted for Bush over Gore by an 11-point margin. But among the 14 percent of voters who attend religious services more than once a week, Bush held a powerful 27-point margin (63 to 36 percent), whereas the 14 percent of voters who never attend services backed Gore by a margin of 29 points (61 to 32 percent). The 23 percent of voters who say that abortion should "always" be legal backed Gore over Bush by an extraordinary 45-point margin (70 to 25 percent); the 13 percent of voters who think abortion should "always" be illegal were even more decisively for Bush, by 52 points (74 to 22 percent). Compare these differences with the ones that used to create the major dividing line between the parties: voters calling themselves "working-class" went for Gore by only 51 to 46 percent, whereas those calling themselves "upper-middle-class" tilted slightly toward Bush, by 54 to 43 percent. Meanwhile, the four percent of voters who consider themselves "upper-class" went for Gore by 56 to 39 percent. In the 2000 election even one's view of Hillary Clinton proved to be a far stronger predictor of one's vote than such historically accurate barometers as social class and education level.

f Red and Blue America are now divided most strongly by sexual and moral values, what does this mean for elections in the years ahead? The 2002 elections, of course, were a great triumph for the Republicans, who gained seats in both the House and the Senate—a rare midterm-election feat for the party that holds the presidency (in fact, this was the first time since 1902 that the Republicans had accomplished it while holding the presidency). But the elections were dominated not by sexual or moral values but, rather, by the one thing that trumps sex: war. As long as a terrorist attack is a serious threat, war talk will dominate elections. But sex, unlike war, does not go away; its return to political center stage is inevitable. And that is decidedly to the Democrats' advantage.

In a 1998 paper on American sexual behavior Tom W. Smith, the director of the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago, found that among people born before 1910, 61 percent of the men and just 12 percent of the women reported having had sex before marriage. These percentages have grown through the generations, much more dramatically among women than among men. Ninety percent of the men born in the 1940s had sex before marriage, as did 63 percent of the women. And of the women born since 1952, only 20 percent reported having been virgins when they married. Many women—and many men, too—cherish the rights that fall under the post-1960s rubric of autonomy and personal freedom, strongly valuing their sexual and reproductive independence. They are willing to vote based on this cluster of issues—and when they do, they vote Democratic.

The demographic reality is that as currently constituted, liberal Blue America is growing and conservative Red America is in decline. Take church attendance. Exit polls in 2000 showed that the more often a voter attended religious services, the more likely he or she would be to cast a ballot for the Republican Party. But long-range trends in religiosity (the term sociologists use for "depth or intensity of religiousness"), as measured by the National Election Studies polling series on church attendance, do not favor the Republicans. From 1972 to 2000 the proportion of voters who said they attended services every week dropped from 38 to 25 percent. The proportion who said they went "almost" every week remained nearly constant at 11 to 12 percent, and the proportion who attended "once or twice a month" rose only slightly, from 12 percent to 16 percent. The proportion who attended just "a few times a year" dropped from 30 to 16 percent. The one group that has grown dramatically consists of those who never go to church or synagogue. This group, which has become a mainstay of liberal politics, made up just 11 percent of the population in 1972 but 33 percent in 2000.

Thus if the Republican Party hopes to build on its 2002 gains, it must continue to mute its social conservatism when speaking to the public. President Bush did just that at a press conference right after the November election, when he pointedly ignored a question about whether social conservatives should "push for new restrictions on abortion," instead focusing on issues of national security. In that press conference he used the words "war," "threat," "terror," "terrorism," "terrorists," and "nuclear" a total of forty-five times.

Many House and Senate Republicans, however, are eager to revive a conservative social agenda. In order to keep his party ascendant Bush will have to hold in check both the Senate conservatives, who have already promised to bring to the floor legislation banning so-called partial-birth abortion, and the House majority leader Tom DeLay, an adamant opponent of abortion rights. (Currently, congressional conservatives are seriously promoting at least three anti-abortion bills.) Bush and his strategists are fully aware that positioning the Republican Party as the party of sexual repression would be devastating to its electoral prospects—but the conservative right is not likely to accede to further delay of its agenda after years of waiting for action under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. For this reason judicial appointments will also present a major challenge for Bush, because social conservatives consider the federal judiciary to be the prime vehicle for reversing the sexual revolution.

As long as al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea dominate the news, the Republicans will be able to maintain their slight advantage. But should war fade into the background, or as soon as emboldened congressional Republicans begin moving to restrict Americans' sexual autonomy, the currently weakened Democratic Party will be positioned to push back with the kind of vitality that propelled Bill Clinton to victory in 1992 and 1996. Lest 1996 seem like ancient history to Republicans, they should recall that more-recent elections demonstrated the power of the electorate's new morality quite vividly: in both 1998 and 2000 (the former a midterm election, when the presidential party traditionally loses ground in Congress) the Democrats gained seats in the House. And these gains came despite—and perhaps because of (insofar as they represented a reaction against the Republican-led drive to impeach Bill Clinton)—their following soon after the most explicit sex scandal in the history of the Oval Office.

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[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[billorites]

Yikes! I'm a liberal Democrat trapped in a Freeper's body!

[The Obstinate Insomniac]

bump

[Free the USA]

fyi

[AntiGuv]

I've long held that modern Americans vote their sex lives more so than their wallets; seems I was right..

[MedicalMess]

So this is to say that if Republicans take the approach that the government has no business in individuals bedrooms then we will win all national elections by a landslide.

I can live with that.

[Archangelsk]

I've long held that modern Americans vote their sex lives more so than their wallets; seems I was right..

We really can't help it. It's that damn reptilian brain stem buried in the midbrain that does it everytime. In all seriousness, except for "fight or flight" the drive to reproduce is the most powerful controlling agent in our body.

[Archangelsk]

I can live with that.

You may be able to live with that, but I doubt the majority of the conservative base can. :-)

(Not coincidentally, didn't our nation have a similar conversation on another vice back in the 1920s? Prohibition anyone?)

[JNB]

This article is a case where someone takes a massive leap in logic to explain events. Many in the US public backed Clinton in 98 because of the stock market, and even in 2000, Gore was boosted by probably 2% by Americans who had fatter wallets who did not want to "rock the boat".

That aside, one difference between Red state and blue state america is the people in the Red states tend to have more children, like Europe, the blue states dominated by secular humanism, the familes are having few if any, children.

As for immigration, as the Democratic party becomes more hostile towrds religion, and as more conservative Catholic bishops gain more power in the US(The ones who reject the seamless garment of life trash and who put the peace & justice crowd in their place), then many immigrants will vote for the GOP.


Lastly and most importantly, as the filures of secular humanism become more blatant, people are going to have to re asses their views on Christianity.

[NewYorker]

Yikes! I'm a liberal Democrat trapped in a Freeper's body!

That makes two of us.

[weikel]

Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong?

Its kinda sick and they seem prone to do bad things.

Do you ever personally look at pornography?

Yes.

Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married?

In most circumstances. Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong?

No.

The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Not organized religion per se.

[weikel]

So this is to say that if Republicans take the approach that the government has no business in individuals bedrooms then we will win all national elections by a landslide.

Bump.

[weikel]

BTW race and gender are the biggest indicators. White males middle class or higher almost never vote dem.

[MedicalMess]

You may be able to live with that, but I doubt the majority of the conservative base can. :-)

I agree. The conservative base can have just about the entire pie if it gives just a little while the totalitarian intolerant left stands to lose it all. Conservatives need to learn to drawn the line in the sand between the rules of their religion and the things that they should not have any say over because it steps on others personal freedom.

Conservatives need to learn strategy. They need to learn how to be relentless and crush the left. Once you do that you can get more of what you want without opposition.

"Not withdrawl Sir..., Redeploy!"

[hemogoblin]

An exact ditto on all your answers, though I think I'm as Republican as I can be.

Maybe what conservatism thrives on is adversity. The easier and softer life gets, the more liberal people become. But notice the spike in church attendance - and support for Bush - when 9/11 scared the bezonkers out of everyone.

[Katya]

"Conservatives need to learn to drawn the line in the sand between the rules of their religion and the things that they should not have any say over because it steps on others personal freedom.

Yes, Thank You!!!
Otherwise conservative republicans act like democrats...they both actively want the government to enforce certain codes and standards...they just differ on "what" those codes and standards are.

[Servant of the Nine]

Yikes! I'm a liberal Democrat trapped in a Freeper's body!

There is a lot of that going around. Caught it myself.

So9

[Ohioan]

I do not really buy the writer's hypothesis. On the other hand, I have no basis for questioning his statistics.

My dubious response if premised rather on the fact that I see Republican clumsiness, rather than the moral issues, per se, as a major factor in these reactions. Had we had more skilled spokesmen, who understood what is really essential and what is not, in terms of traditional sexual values, and discussed the underlying issues from that vantage point, many who reacted negatively to what they saw as a repressive attitude, would not have done so.

It is too late to go into this at great length at this time. My own views on sex and sexual conduct are reflected in my writing; and while on the surface may seem too liberal for some of my fellow Conservatives; properly understood, are really more Conservative than almost anyone else's. (See, for example, The Feminist Absurdity, for example.)

Let me, however, for the sake of brevity, simply suggest what the Republican response to the five inquiries should have been:

Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong?

Most certainly. However, I do not believe it to be the function of Government to go out of its way to harass people suspected of certain private practices with other adults. On the other hand, we cannot accept the studied campaign in the media and entertainment industry, to make us accept homosexuality as normal. [Put the emphasis where it should be, on who is actually picking on whom there.]

Do you ever personally look at pornography?

My viewing habits, as yours, are no one's business but my own. However, I think Society does need to act to protect children obtaining distorted images, at ages when they have no basis on which to judge or really understand what they are seeing. Society has always acted to protect the innocent, and that means some strictures on what may be shown where and to whom.

Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married?

I ascribe to the policy of trying not to judge the personal lives of other people, where their actions do not involve me. As a gentleman, I really do not want to know anything which could compromise the reputation of any woman (whether wife or mistress). That does not mean that I approve of particular conduct. It does mean that I believe in a non-judgmental privacy. What the media appear to be promoting, of course, is a whole other subject.

Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong?

I am not a hypocrite. Nor have I ever judged the girls who accommodate bachelors by a harsher judgment than those bachelors. On the other hand, there are valid moral reasons for a double standard, which reflect both natural and moral concerns--both as to the birth of children and the strength of the marital institution--which is vital to a healthy society. It is just not for me to be judgmental of any individual. (On the other hand, I take a very negative view of people having children out of wedlock, and expecting others to support them.)

The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Yes. But I do not judge those, who feel that they cannot believe strongly in anything they cannot see.

I realize that my answers will seem a gross "cop out" to some. But they reflect not only my personal tolerance, but an understanding of where Government in a free society can and cannot go. I can assure you, also, because they are indeed my responses, that I have no problem with expressing them and explaining them to those whom the writer suggests would otherwise reject the more Conservative candidate.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site