What’s happened to America’s social conservatives? Eight years ago, traditional ‘values voters’ were said to have been key to Bush’s victory. Karl Rove was credited with a strategic master stroke — by persuading the President to talk about ‘life’, not ‘abortion’, he was said to have motivated the conservative base while reaching across the centre to sympathetic undecideds.
But now, Karl Rove is a GOP monkey on Fox News, and the electoral landscape looks very different. Indeed, Obama might have just played the 2004 Republican trick in reverse — by targeting the Republican weakness among women in swing states, he mobilised the left and appealed to moderate American ladies disturbed by Republicans making bizarre comments about rape.
The old blue-collar, often Catholic voters who leant left on financial matters but right on social ones — ie gay marriage and abortion — don’t seem to have featured in 2012.
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