Amateur exit poll analysis, pt 1

I must begin by admitting a major flaw in this argument as I’ve been making it in conversations recently. Upon my first looks at the exit polls, I was astonished by the following question and responses, never mentioned in news reports I’d heard. Voters who came to the polls last Tuesday were asked:

On most political matters, do you consider yourself:

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Liberal	21	85	13	1
Moderat	45	54	45	0
Conservative	34	15	84	0

This struck me as impossible to ignore: liberals, who I guessed had to number as many Americans as conservatives, didn’t bother coming out to vote. However, my conclusions were overreaching:

A CBS/NEW YORK TIMES poll cited by Nunberg showed that "just 22 percent of respondents were willing to describe themselves as liberals, against 35 percent who described themselves as conservatives." But when placed side by side with surveys outlining their political stance, Nunberg concludes, "a lot of people who call themselves moderates hold what most would describe as liberal views." (From PBS’s site.)

I looked up the CBS/New York Times Poll referred to above. (Click on “Interactive Feature: Complete Results: The New York Times/CBS News Poll”.) They’ve asked this question a bunch this year and back as far as 1993. Since then, the number of self-described liberals has generally hovered in the high teens/low twenties. Conservatives have remained pretty consistent in the low- to mid-thirties.

So my apologies to all: I've been wrong to say that the polls directly show how liberals were uninspired to come out for Kerry. I think they still indirectly show that, and they also show that Democratic leaders have gotten terrible at defending their positions in ways that appeal even to their base. I’ll leave it those whom are better equipped to argue that the cause of this is Democratic pandering -- simultaneously to the people they claim to represent and to the corporations they aim to woo. (Although I’ll probably touch on it in my next post on this subject.)

I’ve heard a bunch of mediocre criticism leveled at the reliability of this year’s exit polls. Ron Silver said on MSNBC on election night,

You can be in a certain profession and you can be of a certain ethnicity and you can be in a certain family, when it's much easier to vote for George Bush and walk out of the booth and tell your children, your friends, your family, and your colleagues, that you voted for Kerry. So I think these numbers are very suspect.

It strikes me as difficult to believe that large swaths of voters were so ashamed of whom they wanted to win that they bothered voting and then anonymously lied to pollsters over a range of questions. More plausible, at least in some regions, is that “exit polls may have overstated Kerry support because his supporters were more willing to be surveyed than Bush supporters.” Again, though, this presumes the guy who won -- largely on personal issues like character and faith, no less -- inspired shame in his supporters more than Kerry, the guy who ran on not being the other guy. Again, more on this next time.

Meanwhile, according to PBS’s analysis, somewhere between 10-15% of Americans are ashamed to call themselves liberal. The self-described moderates went for Kerry 54-45%. If there was any skew at all from shame, wouldn’t it be from people who didn’t want to admit they voted for Kerry -- or at least balance out the opposing vote?

Anyway, my point is, this isn’t necessarily the wake-up call I’d believed it to be (that the liberal vote was necessarily suppressed by the Democratic campaign’s reliance on looking and sounding like Bush but not actually being him). Kerry danced around Bush’s “liberal” label during the debates like he’d been called a dirty word, and it reminded me of Kerry’s floundering and sadly unfunny moment during his Daily Show interview:

JON STEWART:
Please refute if you will. Are you the number one most liberal senator in the Senate?
JOHN KERRY:
No.
…
JON STEWART:
[According to cable news, y]ou're the number one most liberal senator. More liberal than Karl Marx apparently. (LAUGHTER) Are you or have you ever flip-flopped?
JOHN KERRY:
I've flip-flopped, flop-flipped. … Labels don't mean anything.

It’s remotely possible that Kerry was trying to make a moral point, the sticks-and-stones lesson you pass to your children when they get called names by the schoolyard bully. But I understood these moments as white flags -- yet another election where liberals have been abandoned wholesale by Democrats. Should I be surprised that almost half of all liberals don’t like being called liberals when the (relatively) liberal candidate for president won’t even address the issue head on?

Let me see if I can present some further evidence.

21% of voters considered themselves liberal (consistent with Americans in general). 37% of voters considered themselves Democrats. For all the talk about how the conservative evangelicals tipped the election, it appears that as many Democrats as Republicans came out to the polls:

Question: No matter how you voted today, do you usually think of yourself as a:

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Democrat	37	89	11	0
Republican	37	6	93	0
Independent or something else	26	49	48	1

Something else to note about the above question: Kerry won those coveted independents by a smidge. Nader wasn’t a factor on the base for either party. Few would dispute that Bush appealed more to the right than Kerry did to the left. So the difference in the election, in these terms, is that Bush pulled more Democrats than Kerry pulled Republicans. Kerry’s refusal to adopt a firm antiwar stance (despite majority support of that position in his party), attack the Patriot Act with any fierceness, take a clear stand on gay marriage (states’ rights isn’t exactly a moral argument), change labor laws or job-siphoning trade treaties, or our immoral health care system, were clearly positions carved out to appeal to moderates, not his party base.

I know this is far out there, people, but if we can entertain the possibility in our minds that Kerry could’ve simultaneously explained Bush’s failures and taken clear opposing stands to them, can we conclude that he could’ve kept the moderates and his base? Another scenario: plenty of Republicans, even in the Senate and House, moderates and extremists too, recognize that Bush’s Iraq policy has been slapdash, visionless, and sloppy; that civil liberties have been eroded more than they wanted by the Patriot Act; and that Bush hasn’t pushed to balance the budget at all. If Kerry had carved out clear, moral positions, he might have pulled as many Republicans as Bush pulled Democrats. And let’s face it, if Kerry lost people on “moral values” it’s because it’s much harder to stake out a middle-of-the-road on strictly moral grounds than a position to either the left or right.

But amid the “moral values” din from the punditry this past week, few note that Kerry won a proportionately equal amount of support from almost as many people on the economy and jobs as he lost on morality. The ground Bush gained on terrorism and taxes was more or less balanced by Kerry’s strength on Iraq, education, and health care. The difference: issues where Kerry did better (except the economy), he won 3 to 1. Issues where Bush did better (except taxes), he won 6 to 1. It does seem like Bush did markedly better because, on the issues he won, he commanded:

Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president? (Check only one)

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Taxes	5	43	57	0
Education	4	73	26	-
Iraq	15	73	26	0
Terrorism	19	14	86	0
Economy/Jobs	20	80	18	0
Moral values	22	18	80	1
Health care	8	77	23	-

About 18% of the electorate claimed to vote specifically against Bush, compared to 28% for Kerry. Compare that to 40% for Bush and about 8% against Kerry:

Was your vote for president mainly:

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
For your candidate	69	40	59	0
Against his opponent	25	70	30	0

67% of voters thought Kerry attacked Bush unfairly, compared to 60% who thought Bush attacked unfairly. 37% of voters who fell into either category vote for the unfair attacker. My conclusion: the old adage is true, the perception of a negative campaign is a turnoff for voters:

Did either of these candidates for president attack the other unfairly?

Category	% Total	Kerry	Bush	Nader
Only John Kerry did	22	5	94	0
Only George W. Bush did	15	93	7	0
Both candidates did	45	53	46	0
Neither candidate did	13	56	42	2