Chart of the Day: The Social Truce

Politics consists of a lot of issue groups raising whatever hell they can. When Mitch Daniels was thinking over a run for president, he told Andrew Ferguson and other conservative writers that the man who won that office “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues.” He wasn’t announcing any social issue flip-floppery of his own. He was just saying that
The new Pew poll demonstrates, one more time, why Daniels was right.
Hell, it’s not even like Daniels had stumbled onto a transcendent insight. Republicans won in 2010 because voters focused on economics. Mitt Romney got himself declared “electable” because he focused on economics and auto-penned the social issues pledges when he needed to. And Romney swears that the new social issue/abortion/contraception flare-ups – brought on, typically, by Republican legislators – are distractions. They certainly look that way. They distract from the issues he can win on.