The man the president credits with designing his reelection says it's a mistake to attribute the election's results to evangelical fervor on social issues.

01:49 PM EST on Wednesday, November 10, 2004

BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON --

Memo to Rhode Island Democrats from Karl Rove:

Last Tuesday was even worse than you thought.

That, at least, is the post-election analysis of the man President Bush calls "the architect" of his victorious campaign for a second term. Senior White House adviser Rove made a cheerfully partisan case yesterday that Mr. Bush's majority was broader and more varied than has been acknowledged. Rove offered Democratic Rhode Island, of all places, as evidence.

Mr. Bush expanded his share of the vote in Rhode Island more than in any other state but Hawaii.

Rove's point, during a statistic-studded hour with a group of newspaper reporters in Washington, was not that the GOP is poised to take over New England. Rove argued, rather, that Mr. Bush's reelection was made up of gains "that tended to be incremental and small and slow" and accumulated throughout the country and across a range of demographic and interest groups.

"Be careful," Rove said more than once, of stereotyping Mr. Bush's victory as the work of evangelical Christians who flooded the polls in the heartland because they oppose gay marriage. Rove affirmed the importance of such voters and issues, but he said the true portrait of the 2004 electorate is much "broader and more subtle."

Rove also said that Mr. Bush intends to help the Republican Party "grow our numbers" in New England and other areas that Sen. John F. Kerry carried. In a related matter, Rove hinted that Republican Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee may get a fence-mending White House invitation from a president determined, in Rove's words, to "serve all the people."

KERRY'S KEY MISTAKE was in his failure to "lay out a vision for the country" during a Democratic convention in Boston that "was received with such rapture in some quarters," Rove said, seeming to punctuate his point with a dig at the news media.

Rove asserted that Mr. Bush, by contrast, "has the old-fashioned idea that campaigns are about laying out an agenda." Without adding much detail, Rove reiterated what Mr. Bush said last week, that he intends to press ahead with the issues he featured during the campaign, including an overhaul of Social Security and the tax code.

But most of Rove's luncheon question-and-answer session was devoted to detailed argument that the 2004 election can be seen as a significant event in modern political history and as a remarkably balanced performance by Mr. Bush.

Thus, Rove noted, Mr. Bush scored marked gains not only with key voting blocs that he carried -- voters over 60, women, Roman Catholics -- but also with groups that he lost: Hispanics, Jews, voters who called the economy their top issue.

And, Rove added, Rhode Islanders.

Kerry carried Rhode Island with 59.4 percent of the vote. Mr. Bush's 38.7-percent share was 6.8 percentage points higher than in 2000. Nationwwide, Mr. Bush's 51-percent majority last week was 3.1 percentage points higher than his total in 2000.

ROVE SUGGESTED that the much-discussed power of the "moral values" issue has been oversimplified as a phenomenon of the Christian right. "It's a very complex and often interrelated group of ideas," he said, broader than just abortion or gay marriage.

Rove noted, for example, that Mr. Bush did not increase his already-dominant share of the devout who attend religious services more than once a week. The president's big rise was in "more occasional churchgoers."

He cautioned that no group is moved to vote by a single issue, but he suggested that the shift in the Catholic vote was an important piece of Mr. Bush's victory.

Rove said he thinks that he met his goal of adding 4 million evangelical Christians to Mr. Bush's side this time. But he added: "Remember, we gained five points among Catholics" to win a majority of that bloc. "Catholics are 25 percent of the electorate. That's a big movement," Rove said, especially considering that the total national vote rose by at least 10 million over 2000.

"It is more than evangelicals, fundamentalists, charismatics, Pentacostalists," Protestant groups that add up to a smaller portion of the electorate -- 20 percent -- than Catholics, Rove said.

Rove affirmed that the gay marriage issue was a significant factor, placed front and center in this campaign by a Massachusetts court decision that permitted gay marriage in the state.

That court ruling "captured and colored the national imagination," Rove said, with the result that many voters believed they had been left out of an important public-policy decision.

But Rove said it wasn't only such controversial issues that moved conservatives and other voters. Mr. Bush won decisively "because of what he said and what he stood for and what he's done and what he said he would do on the campaign trail."

Rove also argued that among voters who cared a lot about the economy, Mr. Bush did significantly better than some commentators recognize. Part of his argument concerned the debate over Social Security, traditionally a winning proposition for the Democrats.

But Mr. Bush made big inroads among the elderly, boosting his share of the over-60 vote by 12 points to carry that bloc, Rove said. "Despite the best efforts of the Democrats to make Social Security a scare issue," elderly people preferred Mr. Bush, Rove said, because he made a clear, simple case for how he plans to preserve the system.

ROVE HINTED that "gestures have been made" from the White House to Chafee and other Republican moderates. Chafee later confirmed that, saying he has had more than one conciliatory phone call from the White House -- though not, so far, from Mr. Bush.

Rove also said that Mr. Bush was not irritated by Chafee's symbolic protest of writing in the name of the president's father on his ballot. "Look, he's a wonderfully independent guy and he's entitled to his opinion," Rove said.

"And he also runs in a very tough state."