What voters mean by “Moral Values” January 9, 2008
Posted by Zack in Uncategorized , trackbackThis is just a press release from the Harris Polling group. No journalist has found it interesting enough to include in a news story yet—perhaps because it presents facts so far outside of the bounds of conventional wisdom.
Turns out, when people say (or hear) “moral values”…as in a poll asking, “How important are moral values to your voting decisions?”…they are thinking about integrity, and usually not abortion or gay marriage:
Of all the people who say moral values are very important in
deciding how to vote, less than a third (30%) are referring to the
candidates’ positions on issues, with by far the largest number (14%)
referring to abortion. In addition, they mention gay rights (3%), that
marriage is between a man and woman (3%) and gay marriage (3%).
A few, but only a very few, mention homosexuality (1%), and stem cell
research (1%).The greatest majority (78%) of these voters mentions personal
characteristics of the candidates including their honesty (28%),
integrity (11%), ethical values (8%), and someone who does the right
thing (8%), is trustworthy (7%), truthful (6%) or keeps his/her word
(6%).
I saw this press release in the Faith in Public life daily email update. If you like this blog, you’ll love their daily email — sign up for it here.
See a sample of what they send here. (Though their email updates come with little blurbs about each article.)
Comments»
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Probably they aren’t picking up on it because it’s kind of meaningless to do a broad poll on the meaning of something that is inarguably a dog-whistle term. A large percentage of the respondents will hear it and associate it with its more standard meaning, while those for whom it is coded will hear it as referencing their particular issue.
Show correlation between the perceived meaning of the term and religious and political affiliations, and you’ve got a poll that might tell us something slightly new–as is, this just demonstrates for what percentage of the sample the term is coded language (a little less than a quarter). I guess it might tell us absorption and spread rates for the coded language, but again you’d want more points of correlation for that to be really interesting.
Thanks much for the compliment, Zack. We work hard on the daily news email, so it’s nice to know you enjoy it!