The 2004 Election Results: How Will They Affect Politics and Policymaking?

Transcript

THOMAS E. MANN: Let me just say our goal today is to understand, really, what happened and why. It seems like a straightforward matter to answer those questions. It turns out it's not at all. It's an intensely complicated matter. Reading marginal frequencies or even simple cross-tabs in exit polls isn't enough to reach definitive conclusions. My guess is we're going to be poring over survey and aggregate data and doing more sophisticated analyses for some time to come.

The other point I would ask you to keep in mind is: what are we trying to explain? If we're trying to explain what moved a majority of voters, that's pretty easy, but not very interesting because it doesn't tell us what happened at the margin to produce the outcome that occurred. So we have to always keep our eyes on the prize: what is it we're trying to understand? Is the important fact the Republican victory, the president winning, the swing from the last presidential election, and the changes in the House and Senate and why they occurred; or is it trying to explain a majority of votes?

When you look at the exit polls, it's easy. One prominent public pollster was very unimpressed with the fact that a plurality of voters chose moral values as the most important factor, arguing that 78 percent didn't and therefore it wasn't important. Well, that's hardly an answer. If in fact this somehow represents or explains the shift that occurred, then this is enormously important. Even if by some measures 75 percent of the electorate has nontraditional religious values, it still could be the case that the activation and mobilization of traditional-values voters explains the outcome of the election. More on that later.

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