Editorial: Politics and 'morality' a fraught mix

The simple result of an election, any election, is never the last word on what is likely to happen. Immediately afterwards the winners and the commentators offer explanations for the result and their conclusions can have powerful consequences.

In the United States right now a consensus is forming that the President's re-election owes its winning margin not to Iraq, or the economy, or tax cuts or any of the issues that figured most prominently in the campaign. The crucial votes, they say, were cast for "moral" issues.

The Republicans won, according to the post-election theory, because millions of votes swung against the Democrats over abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research, that kind of thing. Democrats seem to agree. Yet the only basis for the theory is that, in conjunction with the elections for President and other federal and state offices, 11 states held referendums on a law to ban same-sex marriage and the law passed in all 11 states.

Who knows whether, even in those states, that issue was uppermost in the minds of those who voted for President Bush? Nobody knows unless they poll a reasonable sample of electors.

But this explanation could well pass into accepted political lore and powerfully condition the attitude of the President and the Republican-dominated Houses of Congress for the next four years.

And the explanation could be fallacious. Auckland, to draw a lesson from local politics, has seen just such a spin on the election for the Auckland City Council. The victors in that election have interpreted their victory as a clear public mandate to cancel plans for a highway through the eastern suburbs.

It is nothing of the sort, except for the two members elected from the Hobson Ward who stood on that single issue. But for the council as a whole there is no evidence that the citizens who elected the new council did so to get rid of the eastern highway.

In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. The Herald polled the city on various issues a month or so before the election and the poll, which correctly picked the winner of the mayoral contest, found that a clear majority, 59.9 per cent, of the sample of city residents supported the eastern highway proposal. That DigiPoll survey seems to have been conveniently forgotten by those flexing their new-found muscle on the council.

Voters everywhere have a variety of motives for their decisions. The main reason they select one person over another probably has less to do with the person's promises and policies than his or her personal qualities. Often an issue is no more than a proxy for a personality judgment. That was probably so in Auckland City where the eastern highway was championed by the defeated mayor, John Banks. When the issue was presented in the poll, devoid of the Banks association, nearly 60 per cent were happy with it.

Big assumptions about voters' motives can have far-reaching consequences. President Bush and a Republican Senate are likely to get the opportunity to make several appointments to the US Supreme Court during the next four years. An election construed as a popular signal against abortion, civil unions and the like could encourage appointments that could lock in illiberal laws not for four years but for the remaining lifespan of the appointees. Post-election spin can become powerful mythology.