Morality report

Bill Burga thought he had done everything right on Tuesday, and he was expecting a triumph. Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, led a massive union effort on behalf of Kerry that contributed to a large registration of new voters and the biggest electoral turnout of union members in Ohio history.

On Wednesday morning, he woke up to realise it was not enough. Religious-based groups had done union organisers one better, turning Ohio, and the election, in President Bush8217;s favor by engineering an even greater turnout in more conservative parts of the state.

Said Burga: 8216;8216;I just did not foresee the religious groups and these moral values issues having the pervasive influence they had here. We thought there were other issues like jobs and the war that would be so much more important, and we were wrong.8217;8217;

So were a lot of other people, including Kerry strategists, Democratic activists, some pollsters and most of the media. 8216;8216;Moral values8217;8217;, according to exit polls, was as an issue only slightly exceeded by terrorism in the minds of voters and handily beat out the Iraq war, which had taken up so much of the campaign8217;s time.

Of those who said religious convictions were important as a quality in their leader, 91 percent voted for Bush. 8216;8216;When we did our polling before the election and asked people the five most important issues on their minds, moral values just never came up,8217;8217; said John Zogby, the head of Zogby International, a polling firm that predicted a Kerry victory before the votes came in. 8216;8216;I8217;m baffled. It was obviously extremely important as a driver.8217;8217;

Same-sex marriage 8220;was the great iceberg,8221; said Robert Knight, director of the Culture 038; Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women of America. 8220;It galvanised millions of Christians to turn out and vote, and George Bush and the GOP got the lion8217;s share of that vote.8221; Knight cited 8220;massive efforts8221; by religious groups in Ohio 8220;to rally pastors and to get Christians out of the pews and into the voting booths.8221; He insisted that the marriage issue tapped 8220;a larger perception that the GOP represents the moral order.8221;

To Frank Newport, the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, religion was 8216;8216;the untold story8221; of this election. 8220;It8217;s not some particular group or people who are members of an organization,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;It seems to be much broader.8217;8217;

While measures banning same-sex marriage passed in 11 states, Chuck Wolfe, president of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, noted that openly gay candidates his group had financed scored more successes than in any previous election. His group helped to elect, for instance, an openly lesbian sheriff in Dallas and the first ever gay member of the Idaho statehouse.

8216;8216;There8217;s a great frustration by a lot of us that the mainstream media doesn8217;t interpret religious conservatives well at all,8217;8217; said Tom Minnery, the vice-president of public policy at Focus on the Family, a Christian organisation in Colorado that opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and stem-cell research. 8216;8216;If the Democrats want to come back, they are going to have to learn how to reconnect with us.8217;8217;

In Ohio, union leaders met on Wednesday morning to assess their loss and discuss how to plan for the future, said Burga. He was sober-minded about the efforts required, suggesting that Democratic groups were going to have to learn to change in ways they never imagined: 8216;8216;I know how the religious groups feel about moral issues. Maybe they will never change, but I can.8217;8217;