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For being largely irrelevant, as some pundits claimed, values voters have received an awful lot of attention lately. Pollsters continue to pay the price for underestimating the importance of moral issues at the ballot box. To avoid future embarrassment, many are scrambling to understand the values voter culture so that they can better predict its movements. Yesterday, a new Harris Poll tried to identify what "moral values" actually mean to the voting public. Once again, researchers found that morality does matter to most people (85%) when deciding whom to vote for. Republicans are much more likely (63%) than Democrats (37%) to believe that moral values are important in selecting a candidate.
Interestingly, voters seemed to associate that priority with the "personal characteristics" of the candidates rather than their positions on issues. "These findings show that [the media] must be very careful to assume that voters who feel strongly about 'moral values' are primarily concerned with issues such as abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage... or any of the other issues often associated with the Christian Right," the survey concluded. Although the poll was meant to pigeonhole what many consider an enigmatic voting bloc, it proved a larger point. Unlike some Americans, social conservatives believe that personal morality should influence a candidate's public decisions. This is a foreign concept for many in the liberal media who reduce values to a creed of moral relativism that has little or no impact on a person's behavior--let alone a candidate's. Until the media can reconcile its definition of morality with the Truth, this disconnect about values voters is bound to continue.
