WASHINGTON, 8 November 2004 — Tuesday, Nov. 2, Election Day, our daughter came home from her high school with a very improbable tale. Her school had taken a straw poll for the presidential election and Kerry had won. We live in an extremely Republican part of town and the usual trend is for the kids to vote the same way that their parents do, so a Kerry victory amongst the teens was a big surprise. The next morning our middle school son came home and told us that the word at his school was that, “The three Gs defeated Kerry — “Guns, Gays and God.” Kerry and the Democrats clearly missed the boat in this year’s election.
Post-election data indicated only one out of ten in the 18-24 age group actually voted in the 2004 election, yet most polls also indicated that, had they voted, this age group would have voted heavily for Kerry and the Democrats. Overall, eligible voters came out in the 60 percent range, but the Democrats failed to mobilize young voters who could have made the difference for Kerry and the Democrats. And how did “Guns, Gays and God” affect the election this year? If one looks at a map of the United States highlighting all of the 3113 counties and the presidential election results from those counties, it appears as if Bush won close to 90 percent of the American landscape, although the state-by-state count gave Kerry 19 states plus the District of Columbia and Bush won 31 states. The reality is that Bush overwhelmingly won rural America and with that segment, their concerns about “Guns, Gays and God.”
Most exit polls showed that the highest concern for Americans voting in this election was that of “moral values.” Let’s look at one issue that tests the “moral value” concept and how it might have related to the election.
Most surveys put the number of gay or homosexual Americans at no more than one or two percent of the total population. Yet gay marriage or gay civil unions played a disproportionate role in this year’s election. Kerry said he opposed gay marriage but supported gay civil unions. Republicans tended to be against both, even to the point of introducing a possible constitutional amendment in Congress prohibiting same-sex marriage. This became a major campaign issue with Republicans hammering Kerry and the Democrats by stating that the Democrats supported gay marriage.
Gay marriage and/or civil unions were on the ballots of 11 states during this election and all of these states voted overwhelmingly to ban them. Most of America and the American electorate do not want to see interference with traditional male-female marriages and though this issue only directly related to a tiny percentage of the American population, the 1-2 percent gay population, the Republicans managed to effectively use this issue against Kerry and the Democrats.
The right of Americans to “bear arms” is protected in the US Constitution and fiercely defended by almost all rural Americans. Most Americans defend this right not so that they can go aimlessly shooting up the countryside, but so that they don’t have anyone taking away their hunting rights. Kerry tried vainly to show that he too was a hunter, appearing in a camouflaged goose hunting outfit during the last days of the campaign. Republican ads made him look like a buffoon in his hunting clothes and painted the Democrats as the anti-gun party and won on that issue also.
Religion also played a huge role. Bush lost the popular vote in the 2000 election and squeaked out his victory then through a Supreme Court decision which gave him the edge in electoral votes. Since that time, Bush’s key political advisor, Karl Rove, has stated many times that about four million eligible evangelical Christian voters, who would have probably voted for Bush, didn’t bother to vote in the 2000 election. Rove made it his goal to get those folks out to vote in 2004. Bush won the popular vote by over 3.5 million votes in 2004 and most pollsters say that Rove and his team did, in fact, get these new evangelical voters out to vote for Bush.
So Kerry and the Democrats failed to energize young voters with every indication that youthful voters would have voted for the Democratic Party and Sen. Kerry. Kerry and the Democrats also failed miserably with rural America and got beaten dramatically on the issues of “Guns, Gays and God.”
And they can’t blame it on Ralph Nader this time. Nader received less than 400,000 total votes and his vote total did not turn the tide in any single state.
The Republicans painted Kerry and the Democrats as the “country club class” and sold the American general public on the Republican image as the Walmart party. Most Americans seemed to cast their votes on issues that only directly related to a small percentage of the population, such as gays, rather than issues that related to all of us, such as the issues of two active wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have now losses and causalities in those wars of over three times the number of causalities that we saw on 9/11 and we are likely to see more “pre-emptive and preventative wars” under President Bush. Yet more Americans seemed to care about their hunting rights than the issue of war.
