(Credit to Instapundit for many of these links) This story still gets me irked so I've compiled a quick compendium data / analysis from across the blogosphere on the topic.    First David Brooks sets the stage -

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

To quote Trey Parker & Matt Stone - F*ck Yeah!   Brooks continues -

...there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.

...Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt.

A letter to Andrew Sullivan does some excellent good number crunching comparing states with Gay Marriage referendums and their Bush votes.   The writer concludes -

...one would also expect that [Bush's] vote share improvement would have been particularly high in states in which the marriage issue was particularly relevant. On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush's performance in those states.

On a similar vein, Paul Freedman writing for that bastion of Right Wing Ideology, Slate (sarcasm!) notes -

...by a statistically insignificant margin, putting gay marriage on the ballot actually reduced the degree to which Bush's vote share in the affected states exceeded his vote share elsewhere.

...When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.

Finally, BoiFromTroi notes a nationwide exit poll by the LA Times which called out "Abortion & Gay Marriage" separately from "Moral Values" -

 If the Los Angeles Times' pollsters, which allowed multiple choice answers, are to be believed (a big caveat), 40% of voters voted on "Moral/Ethical Values", with Bush leading, while only 15% voted on "Social issues such as abortion and gay marriage"--where the vote was evenly split!

This result is particularly important, if you agree with my contention that the real gap identified by the horribly ambiguous term "moral values " was actually over things like "honesty" rather than homophobia / anti-abortion.  I'd love to see how more "traditional" "moral values" like "self-reliance" or "civility" would have polled.

---