The myth of the 'values voters': the Republicans hand libertarian votes--and the elections--over to the Democrats.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Columns

AT THE DEMOCRATS' official election night party in Washington, D.C., all eyes were on Florida--for about 10 seconds. At 8 p.m. network exit polls confirmed that Rep. Katherine Harris, for this crowd the arch-villain of the 2000 election, was lopsidedly losing her bid for a Senate seat. The partygoers cheered the news. Then they turned their attention to races that carried at least a whiff of suspense.

They shouldn't have dismissed Florida so quickly. Less than two years earlier, the Sunshine State had shown the first symptoms of the malady that would defeat the GOP in races from California to New Hampshire. Republicans had convinced themselves that socially conservative "values voters" were the key to maintaining and extending their power. It was in Florida that the strategy started to crumble, reminding any politician who cared to listen that a lot of voters just want the government to leave them alone.

The town of Pinellas Park, not far from Harris' old House district, contains the hospice where Terri Schiavo died. The battle between the brain-damaged woman's parents, who wanted to keep her on life support, and her husband, who wanted to remove it, had bubbled up into Florida's Republican-controlled legislature before. But in March 2005, emboldened by the GOP's 2004 victories, Tom DeLay's House and Bill Frist's Senate elbowed into the controversy. President Bush broke off a stint in Crawford, Texas, to sign emergency legislation to keep the feeding tube attached.

It was one of the worst political miscalculations of the decade. Immediately after the Schiavo push, approval numbers for Bush and his party started to plummet. Polls showed not just Democrats but Republicans and independents opposed to the Schiavo intervention. Republicans responded by assuming the polls were wrong. The country had re-elected them, hadn't it? Of course voters were foursquare behind the idea of legislatively re-attaching a feeding tube to a brain-dead woman.

The president's ratings reeled into the 40s, then the 30s, and never really recovered. The numbers for the GOP Congress fell even further. And on election night, voters turned out the most socially conservative Congress in decades while taking a two-by-four to socially conservative initiatives in the states. A ban on all abortions was defeated in South Dakota. Missouri legalized stem cell research. And while seven states passed gay marriage bans, Arizona became the first state ever to reject one. In most of...