Ross Douthat picks up a potentially misleading Karl Rove talking point from Josh Green’s Atlantic story:

As Josh Green notes, quoting Rove, “people who named education as their top issue voted for the Democrat over the Republican 76–16 percent in the 1996 presidential election, but just 52–44 in 2000.”

The problem is that this change may not mean anything. Rove is suggesting that people who value education were more likely to vote for Bush than they were for Bob Dole in 1996. However, we know that the public takes its cues from elites on what issues are important. As a result, it’s more likely that many Republicans followed Bush’s lead in naming education as a top priority, which would also shift the balance of support toward Bush in that category. (We would need better data than the exit poll can provide to know for sure.)