A Matter of Faith: Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election

Chapter 7: The Case of Bush's Reelection: Did Gay Marriage Do It?

In the case of George W. Bush’s reelection, did gay marriage do it? One storyline of the 2004 election, widely repeated in the immediate wake of the contest, went something like this: Bush returned to the White House because he capitalized on many voters’ concerns about moral values. Specifically, he rode a groundswell of opposition to same-sex marriage in those eleven states that held referenda on gay marriage simultaneously with the presidential election. Voters who otherwise would have stayed home on Election Day turned out to thwart gay marriage and, while at the polls, also cast a ballot for Bush. This story stands in contrast to the traditional account of a president’s coattails, whereby congressional candidates benefit from their association with a popular presidential candidate who is of the same party. It is better labeled a reverse coattail effect. Earlier chapters have shown that the hue and cry about moral values in the immediate wake of the election was overblown. As Sunshine Hillygus shows, for most voters the 2004 contest centered largely on their attitudes about the economy, the war in Iraq, and which candidate they felt was better able to keep the country safe from terrorism. However, as Scott Keeter illustrates, moral values did matter to a well-defined subset of the population: religious traditionalists, particularly evangelical Christians. Further probing reveals The Case of Bush’s Reelection Did Gay Marriage Do It? David E. Campbell and J. Quin Monson 7 120 THE CASE OF BUSH’S REELECTION: DID GAY MARRIAGE DO IT? 121 that for these voters the term “moral values” often connotes issues like gay marriage. In other words, while gay marriage may not have mattered much to most voters, it mattered a lot to a few voters. And in a close election, that may have been enough to tip the scales in favor of Bush. Of course, in a close election almost any issue or group can be said to have been decisive. As in any investigation, to solve the case of Bush’s reelection, the suspect must be shown to have had the motive, means, and opportunity, all of which are necessary, but none of which is sufficient to close the case. Forensic evidence is the clincher. The remainder of the chapter, therefore, is laid out accordingly. We begin by considering Bush’s motive for capitalizing on gay marriage, how the issue came to represent an opportunity for his reelection bid, and the means employed by his campaign to benefit from the issue among social conservatives, without incurring a backlash from social moderates who supported Bush for other reasons. We then turn to the forensic evidence regarding the role of gay marriage in the reelection of George W. Bush.1 Motive Having lost the 2000 popular vote and won the White House only by way of a controversial Supreme Court decision, George W. Bush had a strong motivation to boost support wherever he could in preparation for his reelection bid. His reelection rested on widening, even if only slightly, his electoral coalition. As has been noted in previous chapters, Karl Rove identified evangelicals as a group among whom Bush needed to shore up support—the now famous comment about the 4 million “missing evangelicals.” This was not an obvious group for Rove to target for growth, as conservative Protestants had supported Bush overwhelmingly in 2000. As Green and his coauthors report in chapter 2, 87 percent of traditionalist evangelicals voted for Bush in the 2000 election.2 It is not clear how Rove arrived at the precise figure of 4 million missing evangelicals , but given that Rove is in the business of winning elections, not providing transparent analysis of election data, its provenance is largely irrelevant. 1. For other scholarly analysis of the role of gay marriage in the 2004 election, see Abramowitz (2004); Burden (2004); Hillygus and Shields (2005); McDonald (2004); Smith, DeSantis, and Kassel (2005). 2. Throughout this chapter, we use the terms “conservative Protestants” and “evangelicals ” interchangeably. We recognize that, technically, not all conservative Protestants are evangelicals and not all evangelicals are conservative Protestants. However, the two groups overlap to a great extent, and the distinctions scholars draw among conservative Protestants— evangelicals versus fundamentalists, for example—are too nuanced for our empirical analysis. 122 DAVID E. CAMPBELL AND J. QUIN MONSON What matters is that Rove saw energizing the evangelical base of the...