TruthBook Religious News Blog

2 of 3 white voters identify themselves as evangelical Christians

Duncan Mansfield, Associated Press
Thursday, November 13, 2008

Their presidential candidate lost and their influence in national politics may be waning, but white evangelical Christians clearly dominated the 2008 election in Tennessee.

Even for a Bible Belt state that is headquarters to the Southern Baptist Convention, their majority was surprising — two of every three white voters in Tennessee identified themselves as evangelical Christians in exit polls.

This in a state where 84 percent of the voters were white, according to surveys of 1,520 randomly selected voters by Edison Media Research for The Associated Press and television networks.

McCain carried Tennessee convincingly, and the white evangelical turnout likely contributed to Republicans taking control of both chambers of the Tennessee Legislature for the first time in 140 years.

Out of the 40 states where exit polls asked voters if they are born-again Christians, only Arkansas had more white evangelicals than Tennessee. Arkansas had 55 percent. Tennessee and Oklahoma each had 52 percent. For Tennessee, that was virtually unchanged since 2004.

The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, meaning white evangelicals actually could make up anywhere from 48 percent to 56 percent of Tennessee’s voters.

Arkansas is home to Mike Huckabee, the former governor and ordained Baptist minister who beat McCain in the Republican presidential primary in Tennessee in February.

White evangelicals made up 26 percent of voters nationwide in this election.

They voted 3-1 for McCain across the country and in Tennessee. But for the first time in several election cycles, white conservative Christians weren’t a factor in the national contest. Obama won easily — 53 percent to 45 percent — without them.

Tennessee exit polls showed that a presidential candidate’s values were most important to about a third of voters overall, but to an even greater number — 41 percent — of white evangelicals.

More than half of white, evangelical Christians in Tennessee said the economy was the No. 1 issue, slightly fewer than all voters statewide, followed by terrorism, slightly more than voters across the state.

Tennessee white evangelicals were far more likely to be Republican and live in East Tennessee.

White, evangelical Christians were 44 percent Republican, 37 percent Independent and 19 percent Democrat, compared with Tennesseans overall, who are 32 percent Republican, 37 percent Independent and 30 percent Democrat, according to the poll.

They represented two of every three voters in East Tennessee and slightly more than half the voters in the rural counties of Middle and West Tennessee. They were just less than half the voters in metropolitan Nashville and about two of every five voters in greater Memphis.

Labels: Barack Obama, Duncan Mansfield, election, evangelicals, John McCain, Tennessee, voters

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Obama backed by all religions, Pew says

Nov. 10, 2008
By Sommer Ingram
Staff Writer

Along with becoming the nation's first African-American president-elect, Barack Obama gained more support in this election from nearly every religious group than Democratic nominee John Kerry did four years ago.

According to the Pew Forum, Obama won 26 percent of the white evangelical vote compared, to the 21 percent that voted for Kerry in 2004.

Although his gains were minimal, Obama seems to have made the religion element work for him in a way other Democrats historically haven't.

Though polls show white Roman Catholics and Protestants backing Republican candidate John McCain, Obama won nearly all of the black and Hispanic Protestant votes. Catholics supported him over McCain 54 percent to 45 percent. He also improved the minority evangelical vote significantly.

These groups have wider and more diverse views than are traditionally publicized."

The traditional concerns of the evangelical world, primarily abortion and gay rights, are not seen as prevalently among younger evangelicals.

Economical issues proved to overshadow the traditional cultural concerns for both parties, which could have also have contributed to his success among the religious electorate. More than six in 10 cited the economy as the nation's top concern.

Despite the fact that white evangelicals between the ages 30 and 64 remained a center pillar in the Republican support base, Obama's concentrated outreach to the religious community resulted in modest gains on Kerry's percentages in Colorado, North Carolina and Ohio.

The Democratic candidate's campaign may signal the beginning of reversing the prevailing stereotype that casts Democrats as worldly and anti-religious.

"I believe we will continue to see various strategies with religious voters," Allman said. "I think we'll have to go through a couple more election cycles to see whether there will be a more varied voting pattern. It's a little early to tell, but however small these movements we saw, they were all in the direction of the Democrats."

Labels: Barack Obama, election, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religious community, Sommer Ingram, voters

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Religious voters helped Obama to victory

His focused effort to target a group that had heavily favored Republicans paid off, an exit poll shows.

By Cathleen Decker
November 9, 2008

As he vaulted into national acclaim with his 2004 Democratic convention speech, Barack Obama directly took on the assumption that his party should cede religious voters to the Republicans.

Exit polls showed the dramatic effect: Obama won 43% of voters who said they attend church weekly, eight percentage points higher than 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry. Among occasional worshipers, Obama won 57%, 11 percentage points higher than Kerry, according to the National Election Pool exit survey.

When looking at how members of different faiths voted, the movement among Catholics is striking. They sided 52% to 47% with President Bush in 2004. But this year, they went 54% to 45% for Obama. That means Obama had more support among Catholics than did Kerry, himself a Catholic, by seven percentage points.

"Obama did better than Kerry among pretty much every religious group," said Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life who analyzed the poll results.

Even among voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians or evangelicals, a group that tends to vote Republican, Obama improved on Kerry's standing -- although he came in a distant second to GOP nominee John McCain. Kerry had won 21% of evangelical voters; Obama won 26%.

Nearly two years ago, when voters knew little about him, the Illinois senator stood alongside nationally known author and Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest for a televised AIDS conference. Earlier, Obama had asked Warren to review a chapter of his book "The Audacity of Hope."

Obama again gained the attention of Christian voters in July when he pledged to expand a controversial White House program to give federal grants to churches and small community groups. The proposal, which would build on efforts by the Bush administration to direct government money to church groups, was announced in Zanesville, Ohio, a hotly contested state that Obama won on election day.

And at the Democratic National Convention in August, which held its first-ever interfaith prayer gathering, the party platform endorsed by Obama -- while not backing away from its support for abortion rights -- emphatically reached out to women with children who rely on programs meant to ease their struggle.

Obama's ease in talking about his religion also helped him win over religious voters. During a presidential forum held in August at Saddleback Church, where he and McCain were interviewed separately by church leader Warren, Obama spoke about "walking humbly with our God" and quoted from the Gospel of Matthew. His acceptance speech Tuesday night echoed in parts the church-inspired speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Religion, for a time, became a thorn for Obama during the presidential race. He was harshly criticized for his association with the now-retired Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose incendiary sermons about white America caused an uproar and led Obama to part ways with his longtime pastor, and endured a viral e-mail campaign falsely asserting that he is Muslim.

The election results returned Catholics to their historical Democratic moorings, which many had fled for the GOP during the Reagan years.

Labels: Barack Obama, Cathleen Decker, faith, religion, voters

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Friday, November 07, 2008

Obama made inroads with religious vote

The Democrat prevailed with Roman Catholic and Jewish voters. He even picked up support among Evangelicals.
By Alexandra Marks
New York

This year it appears the Democrats got religion, at least in terms of the vote.

In becoming the president-elect, Barack Obama made gains among religious voters of almost every type compared with recent Democratic presidential candidates. He handily won the Catholic and Jewish votes, and even picked up support among Protestants and some Evangelicals, long a pillar of Republican ballot-box strength.

Some theologians suggest that the religious shift signals the emergence of a faith-based coalition that will counterbalance or, perhaps, replace the religious right. It’s made up of mainline religious progressives, black and Hispanic Evangelicals, and a growing number of younger, white Evangelicals and Catholics.

During the campaign, both presidential camps made a point of reaching out to the opponent’s core religious constituencies. Obama’s campaign spearheaded a grass-roots drive to bring in young Evangelicals and Catholics. The McCain campaign relied more on surrogates like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I) of Connecticut to try to bring Jewish voters into the GOP.

Their success varied. The McCain campaign had hoped to exploit Jewish voters’ initial unease with Obama, raising questions about the depth of his support for Israel and his willingness to negotiate with its enemies, such as Iran. It ran television ads in Florida and other places with large Jewish populations that quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Ahmadinejad says Israel won’t survive…. Obama says he would meet with him personally.”

Senator Lieberman, a leading political Jewish voice and a former Democratic vice presidential nominee, was frequently with Senator McCain on the stump. When he wasn’t, he was often in Florida working on behalf of his GOP Senate colleague.

Some Republicans also sought to exploit fears that Obama was secretly a Muslim or had close associations with anti-Semitic black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan.

That did not sit well with some Jews, who organized rabbis and others to counter such attacks on Obama.

Then there was Sarah Silverman to contend with. The young Jewish comedienne became the spokeswoman for the so-called Great Schlep. It signed up more than 25,000 young Jewish voters and urged them to go to Florida to get their grandparents to support Obama.

Obama managed to solidify Jewish support: 78 percent supported him over McCain, according to an analysis of election polls by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. In 2004, 74 percent of Jewish voters backed Democrat John Kerry for president.

The Obama campaign was more successful in making inroads with some of the GOP’s core constituencies. It reached out to Catholic voters who attend mass regularly – a group that went for Mr. Bush by 12 percentage points in 2004. This year, Obama and McCain split that vote. Among Catholics who attend mass less often, Obama won overwhelmingly.

“In 2004, Bush split with Kerry those Catholics who attended less often, but Obama won that group by 18 percentage points. That is a very significant shift,” says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “Part of the explanation is the significant shift to Obama among Hispanic Catholics.”

Obama also worked to reach out to the Republicans’ white evangelical base, but he had less success there. He did win more support among them than Senator Kerry did in 2004, but only by a few percentage points.

“When we’re looking at white Evangelicals, we’re looking at one of the strongest Republican constituencies in the country – a group that would be very hard to move into the Democratic column under any circumstances,” says John Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum. “From that perspective…, one could argue that this may be some evidence of success.”

Other analysts say Obama did make inroads with younger white evangelicals in key states like Colorado and Indiana, where he boosted his support among Evangelicals by 14 percentage points and 8 percentage points, respectively, over Kerry’s 2004 levels.

Labels: Alexandra Marks, Barack Obama, Catholic, evangelicals, voters

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Saturday, September 01, 2007

Religion Shaping Race and Defining Candidates

August 27, 2007
New York Daily News

NEW YORK - A crowd cheered fervently in Iowa this month as Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback quoted Mother Teresa telling him, "All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus."

Barack Obama's recently launched Spanish-language radio ad in Nevada tells the targeted Hispanic audience, "Barack Obama is a Christian man."

Hillary Clinton doesn't hesitate to let voters know the importance of prayer in her life, while Rudy Giuliani awkwardly dodges questions about his standing as a Catholic.

And then there's Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Everywhere he goes, Romney faces questions about his Mormon faith.

Religion has played a role in presidential elections throughout history. But not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic elected to the White House, has it been as omnipresent on the campaign trail.

Historians and political experts say it's unlikely religion - or social issues embraced by Christian conservatives - will dominate the 2008 path to the Oval Office because the war in Iraq and homeland security seem uppermost in voters' minds.

"Nothing in the conversation, thus far, makes it sound like gay marriage and abortion are going to outshine the war," said Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center.

But there's no escaping religion on the campaign trail. While other issues loom large, voters want to know where candidates stand when it comes to faith.

Bill Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School and professor of church history, said the campaign now under way showcases the nation's "continuing religious saga."

A century ago, "nobody would have believed" a Catholic could be elected president, Leonard said. The 2008 race is "just another illustration of the power of pluralism in American religious experience, that indeed a Catholic was elected and that indeed a Mormon is running as such a potentially viable candidate."

Earlier this year, a Pew Research Center survey revealed religion continues to play a role in shaping voters' decisions. Nearly four in 10 Americans said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is Christian, and 63 percent would not support a candidate who doesn't believe in God.

The poll showed 30 percent of Americans admitting they were less likely to vote for a Mormon. That hurdle rises to 46 percent for a Muslim.

For Clinton and Giuliani, the two New Yorkers seeking the Oval Office, the role of religion in their campaigns is a study in contrasts.

Clinton, a Methodist, talks freely about the power of prayer in her life. She's spoken publicly about how religion helped her overcome tough struggles, most notably her decision to forgive infidelity in her marriage.

"Obviously, my faith was crucial to the challenges I faced," Clinton recently told The New York Times, when asked whether her religion influenced her to stay married to Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair.

But Giuliani, who had an affair with his current wife while married to his second wife, took a virtual vow of silence when asked in Iowa this month about his religious beliefs.

"My religious affiliation ... and the degree to which I am a good or not-so-good Catholic, I prefer to leave to the priests," said Giuliani, who once considered becoming a priest.

Former Sen. John Edwards, a Methodist, sparked controversy when he cited his faith as influencing his opposition to same-sex marriage. Later, at a forum on gay issues, he recanted. "I shouldn't have said that," said Edwards, drawing applause.

Many candidates, especially Democrats, feel compelled to discuss religion openly because President Bush's profession of faith played a prominent role in his successful 2000 and 2004 White House bids, giving the religious right plenty of political clout.

But when it comes time to pulling the lever, most experts said they doubt religion will be the deciding factor.

"There are some regions of the country where religious ideology and a certain kind of (faith) shape voters' decisions very much," Leonard said. But bottom line, Americans "want to know who is going to get us home from Iraq, and are any more bridges going to fall down, and what do we still do about New Orleans."

Labels: Barack Obama, faith, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Pew Research Center survey, politics, religion, Sam Brownback, voters

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Thursday, May 10, 2007

Parsing the Polls: Religion in Public Life

Sifting through the transcript of last week's Republican presidential debate, we came across this exchange between former Govs. Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Mike Huckabee (Ark.) about the role of religion in the public square.

Romney: "We have a separation of church and state. It's served us well in this country. This is a nation, after all, that wants a leader that's a person of faith, but we don't choose our leader based on which church they go to."

Huckabee: "I said, in general -- and I would say this tonight to any of us -- when a person says, 'My faith doesn't affect my decision- making,' I would say that the person is saying their faith is not significant to impact their decision process. I tell people up front, 'My faith does affect my decision process.' It explains me. No apology for that."

The candidates' comments got us thinking about how much or little the American public wants to hear about religion from their elected officials. Conventional wisdom says that most voters want a person of faith in the White House but are simultaneously wary of religion encroaching upon affairs of state.

Is that conventional wisdom right? Let's Parse the Polls!

First of all, it's important to set the backdrop on which the debate over how much religion we want in our public policy takes place. According to exit polling in 2004 and 2005, roughly nine in ten voters say they have a religious beleif system of some sort ("Protestant/other Christian" is by far the largest group), while 85 percent said they went to church at least a few times a year.

Looking at those numbers it's clear that the vast majority of Americans not only see themselves as religious but also seek out the communal setting of a church, synagogue, mosque, etc. at least a few times a year.

But, when it comes to whether religion should play a larger role in public life, people are far more divided.

In a January 2007 survey, Gallup asked people whether they would like to see "organized religion have more influence in this nation, less influence, or keep its influence as it is now." Twenty seven percent said they would like to see religion play a larger role, 32 percent said they'd prefer a smaller role and 39 percent said they would like to keep the status quo.

Those numbers are remarkably consistent with an April 2005 Washington Post/ABC News poll. In that survey, 27 percent said they preferred religion have "greater" influence in public life, 35 percent said "less" while 36 percent chose "the same."

Compare those numbers to a Gallup poll conducted in January 2001 -- at the start of the Bush Administration. In that poll 22 percent said they wanted less religion in the public sphere. In 2007, 32 percent said the same thing, a jump of ten percent in six years. Some have speculated that President Bush's willingness to talk publicly about his faith -- combined with his growing disapproval ratings -- may be responsible for the rise in the percentage of people who are put off by politics influenced by religion.

A May 2004 CBS News poll asked what worried people more: "Public officials who don't pay enough attention to religion and religious leaders or public officials who are too close to religion and religious leaders?"

Overalll 35 percent said they worried more about politicians not paying enough attention to religion, while 51 percent said they fretted about politicians paying too much attention. Isolate Republicans, however, and the numbers were nearly reversed with 53 percent saying politicians don't pay enough attention and 30 percent choosing the "too close" option. Compare that with just 25 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Independents who wanted public officials to pay more attention to religion and religious leaders. The partisan gap is obvious.

While the American public is closely divided over the role religion should play in public life, there is a less of a chasm when it comes to several religion-related policy fights like prayer in school or displaying the Ten Commandments on government property.

An August 2005 Gallup poll showed 76 percent of the sample favored a constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer in schools, while just 23 percent opposed it. In that same survey 60 percent said that religion had "too little of a presence" in public schools while 27 percent said the amount of religion in schools was about right and 11 percent said it was too much.

The American public also tends to favor the display of the Ten Commandments on government property with 75 percent of a CNN/USA Today/Gallup sample in June 2005 saying the Supreme Court should allow that sort of display and just 23 percent saying it should not.

What to make of this raft of numbers? That we are a country divided -- sometimes even within ourselves -- when it comes to the proper role of religion in public life. On the one hand most Americans see themselves as a religious people; on the other, they remain generally wary about religion seeping into politics.

Because no obvious consensus exists, it's likely that the politicians running for president in 2008 will seek to find a balance between making clear to voters that they believe in a higher power while also making clear they won't be taking their marching orders from the church they attend.

It's a complicated position but reflects the divided mind most Americans have when it comes to religion's role in everday life.

The Fix owes a big debt of gratitude to The Washington Post polling team of Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta. As they so often do, the two provided essential help in making sense of all these numbers.

Labels: Americans, faith, Gallup, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, politics, religion, separation of church and state, Ten Commandments, voters