A religious revival that turned the tide

By Paul Sheehan
November 6, 2004

When the Democrats won the popular vote but lost the election in 2000 they knew the result could be reversed in 2004 if they could turn just a single big state. That state was Ohio.

It was, after Florida, where the Republicans had won their narrowest victory and where job losses had been heaviest during the Bush presidency.

Last Tuesday, the Democrats got a 22 per cent surge in Ohio, an increase of 474,000 votes, much higher than Mr Bush's winning vote four years ago.

They lost anyway. They lost Ohio and they lost the general election, beaten by an even bigger force - the Bush "values" campaign.

President Bush has been energised by the 59.4 million votes he won on Tuesday, the most by any presidential candidate in history, and a dramatic 18 per cent improvement over his vote in 2000, while also leading the Republicans to strengthen their control of both houses of Congress.

Mr Bush has promised to spread democracy around the world, but what sort of democracy? Secular liberalism is not the primary vision of democracy subscribed to by Mr Bush or the grassroots political army of 1 million volunteers that mobilised for the Republicans.

"There has been a new turn to religion, a Great Awakening in America," wrote Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington in his recent book, Who Are We? "It should not be surprising if Americans again turn to religion to find their national identity and their national purpose."

Professor Huntington described the 2000 election as probably the most influenced by religion of any election in American history. The 2004 election was even more so.

In Ohio, for example, the difference between victory and defeat was the 130,000 conservative Christians that President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, helped recruit in the nation's crucial battleground.

The Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, won 55.9million votes, more than any winning candidate in any previous presidential election, but the electoral process disproportionately awards the winner; and President Bush, who acted decisively after his election in 2000 despite the barest of electoral mandates, has now won a clear majority of the popular vote.

President Bush can now reshape American politics to strengthen the triumph won by socially conservative middle America.

The Bush Republicans will also move to show that a whole range of the conventional wisdom prior to the 2004 election was neither conventional nor wise.

Conventional wisdom said that a surge in voters in 2004 would primarily benefit the Democrats.

Wrong. Mr Bush received almost 9 million more votes than he did when elected four years ago. Senator Kerry also improved the Democratic vote, but by only 4.8 million, barely half the increase won by Mr Bush.

Conventional wisdom, and all the opinion polls, said the vote would be razor-thin.

Wrong. Mr Bush turned a deficit of 543,000 votes in 2000 into a majority of more than 3.5million, a 4 million-vote turnaround.

He won 51.4 per cent of the vote to Senator Kerry's 48.3 per cent, clear political daylight compared with the virtual dead-heat of four years ago.

Conventional wisdom said that the intense activism of film-maker Michael Moore and the similar cohorts of Bush-haters in the media would generate a groundswell of anti-war support for Senator Kerry.

Wrong. The groundswell of new voters for Mr Bush was twice as large as the groundswell of new voters for Mr Kerry. Many analysts, such as the veteran Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, who described Moore's tactics as "thuggery", believed the campaign of personal vitriol did more to help Mr Bush politically than harm him.

Conventional wisdom held that if Mr Bush actively campaigned for the conservative Christian vote he would lose the liberal wing of the Republicans.

Wrong. Mr Bush held nearly all the Republican vote while building an even broader base of support among evangelical Christians who did not vote in 2000.

If, as appears likely, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, wins re-election in 2005 and John Howard gives way to Peter Costello in 2006, the three leaders of the aggressive Anglo-Saxon alliance that invaded Iraq would all have been re-elected, and all three countries would be led by committed and increasingly overt Christians.