Democrats to Begin Painful Assessment
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BOSTON – Stung by the defeat of their presidential nominee and by painful losses in the House and Senate, Democrats scrambled yesterday to assess why the party fared so poorly, particularly in the South and Midwest.
Several Democrats warned of cataclysmic consequences if the party fails to address what appeared to be a huge advantage for the Republicans among voters who said moral issues were critical to their vote.
“It’s absolutely crucial,” a Democratic pollster, Paul Maslin, said. “I think it is a huge problem and it’s not going to be solved overnight.”
In exit polls of voters yesterday, 22% of respondents said they were motivated primarily by concerns about moral values. President Bush won the votes of 80% of those people, while only 18% of them chose Senator Kerry. Nationally, white evangelicals overwhelmingly favored the president. In the pivotal state of Ohio, they accounted for 25% of all voters.
Some prominent Democrats said Mr. Kerry’s presidential bid was badly hurt by the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision last November legalizing gay marriage. A former national party chairman, Steven Grossman, said he strongly supports the ruling but believes it contributed to the perception that Mr. Kerry was too liberal.
“The law of unintended consequences is alive and well. This is one of the unintended consequences of that historic decision,” Mr. Grossman said. “Karl Rove and the Republicans were very successful in demonizing John Kerry as the liberal from Massachusetts that gave marriage rights to gays and lesbians.”
A professor of government and sociology at Harvard, Theda Skocpol, said the timing of the court decision was devastating to Mr. Kerry.
“I happen to think the decision the judges made in Massachusetts couldn’t have been more fatally timed for producing the mobilization in rural areas that Democrats achieved in this election,” Ms. Skocpol said. “It had enormous symbolic relevance, and the Republicans played that for all it was worth.”
Gays and lesbians active in Democratic politics expressed fear yesterday that they and their issues were being made scapegoats for Mr. Kerry’s loss.
“I think it’s an easy excuse for people to make,” said the chairman of the party’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender caucus, Jeffrey Soref. “There are much more profound problems within the Democratic Party. It wasn’t gay marriage.”
In 10 states, ballot measures banning gay marriage passed by resounding margins Tuesday, with an 11th narrowly defeated by Oregon voters. Mr. Soref said, however, that the moral issues on which voters focused went far beyond homosexuality and included abortion, stem-cell research, and school prayer.
“You’re talking about a whole host of things,” he said. “A much bigger question is how did the Democratic Party spend several hundred million dollars and come up with such weak results.”
Some Democrats expressed criticism of the Kerry campaign yesterday, but they seemed to doubt the senator would have prevailed Tuesday, even if he had run a better campaign.
A senior fellow at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Marshall Wittman, said he sees the party’s disconnect with socially conservative and religiously devout voters as its most serious problem.
“It is imperative, it is critical, it is overarching for Democrats to find a language to address these cultural and moral issues,” Mr. Wittman said. “It’s the primary reason why Bush won. It’s not just abortion or homosexuality. It’s faith. It’s even patriotism in the context of national security.”
Mr. Wittman said Democrats could make inroads simply by discussing their faith publicly, even if they do not make major changes in their policy positions. He said Mr. Bush always seems comfortable discussing his faith, while many Democratic candidates, such as Mr. Kerry, appear awkward when addressing such matters. One challenge is that many secular voters already in the Democratic camp are disturbed by any public discussion of religion.
“Democratic elites often just have disdain for it and don’t comprehend it,” Mr. Wittman said.
Ironically, the Democratic presidential candidate who was most averse to discussing religion in public during this election cycle was the one who came closest to predicting the trouble the party would encounter with rural white voters, many of whom are socially conservative. While running for the Democratic nomination, a former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, spoke of his desire to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”
Mr. Maslin, who conducted polls for Dr. Dean, noted that many Democrats attacked his comment as reflecting some kind of veiled racism.
“Dean was denounced for saying if we don’t go after Bubba with the pickup truck and even the gun rack in back, we’re in trouble,” the pollster recalled. “What he said is as true today as the day he said it. We cannot be surrendering an entire region of the country and we can’t be allowing the Republicans – by whatever means, whether it be the flag, whether it’s God, whether it’s guns – to be exclusively communicating with those people.”
Neither Dr. Dean nor Mr. Kerry was successful at carrying that message, Mr. Maslin said. “We’re going to need some blend of Carter and Clinton,” the pollster said.
Mr. Maslin said the list of Democrats who could fit the bill is short. He mentioned the governor of Virginia, Mark Warner, and the senator-elect from Illinois, Barack Obama, as Democratic candidates who have been able to make faith part of their electoral appeal.
Some analysts said the role of moral issues and the “liberal” label in Mr. Kerry’s defeat could hurt the chances of one of the possible Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2008, Senator Clinton. Mr. Wittman said, however, that Mrs. Clinton can be quite comfortable making a faith-based appeal.
Because of Mrs. Clinton’s iconic status in the party, Mr. Wittman said, she might have more room than other Democrats to take conservative positions on some social issues. “They’ll give her a pass because they love her so much on the left,” he said.
Even those who see the problem of moral values as a serious one for the Democrats cautioned against an overreaction to an election that involved several unusual factors.
“If it hadn’t been for the conjunction of the post-9/11 sense of national security threat and the gay-marriage issue, I’m not sure the outcome would have been as it was,” Ms. Skocpol said. “I personally don’t think Democrats should go into a paroxysm of self-blame over this.”