The Stained Glass Divide
Alex Lundry is the director of research at the Republican firm TargetPoint Consulting, which specializes in segmenting and targeting voters based on their consumer and social behavior. Some months ago I asked Lundry what one piece of information, apart from partisan registration, he would most want to know about someone to predict whether he or she usually votes Republican or Democratic. He didn't hesitate for more than a moment. "Whether there is a Bible present in their home," he said.
New Gallup data released today helps explain Lundry's answer. Gallup confirmed that the Republican Party continues to hold the most appeal to the most religiously devout, especially among whites. The results underscore the extent to which the two parties' electoral coalitions continue to revolve around cultural affinities and attitudes rather than class, even amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
To produce the portrait, Gallup cumulated results from their nightly tracking poll interviews from July through this October, which produces an unusually large sample that allows for unusually detailed analysis. They segmented the population into three groups: the very religious (the 40 percent of adults those who say religion is an important part of their daily life and who attend religious services at least once weekly); the non-religious (the 31 percent who say religion is not an important part of their daily life and attend services rarely or never); and the moderately religious (the 28 percent who give answers that fall between those poles).
The Gallup analysis shows that very religious whites (who comprise just over one-fourth of the overall population) continue to gravitate toward the GOP in large numbers: sixty-two percent of whites in that category identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Just 27 percent of such devout whites identify with or lean toward the Democrats.
With non-religious whites the picture is very different. Half of them identify with the Democrats; just one-third align with Republicans. White adults who identify as moderately religious fall in between with a GOP tilt: 48 percent of them identify as Republicans and 36 percent as Democrats.
Much more modestly, the same patterns hold among Hispanics and Asians. Among Hispanics who consider themselves very religious, 27 percent identify with the GOP, up from 22 percent among the least religious. Among Asians, Republican identification peaks at 35 percent among the most religious and sinks to 21 percent among the least. Religious devotion makes little difference among African-Americans: just 10 percent of the most religious identify with the GOP, compared to 9 percent among the least.
Looking then at all adults, Republicans lead Democrats in identification among the very religious by 49 percent to 36 percent; Democrats lead Republicans among the non-religious by 52 percent to 30 percent; and Democrats narrowly lead among the moderately religious by 44 percent to 38 percent.
These findings fit long-standing patterns. As I noted in my 2007 book The Second Civil War, since the 1970s one of the best predictors of how people vote is how often they attend religious services. Using data from the University of Michigan's National Election Studies, John Green, a University of Akron political scientist, calculated that during the 1950s and 1960s there was no appreciable difference in the support for Republican presidential candidates among voters who attended church at least once or week and those who attended more rarely or not at all. But since the 1970s, Republican candidates have consistently run better among frequent church attenders; in the 1992 and 1996 elections, the GOP candidate ran on average almost 18 percentage points better among frequent church attenders. In 2000 and 2004, the GOP advantage among frequent church attenders totaled 13 percentage points. In 2008, according to the National Election Pool exit poll conducted by Edison Research, John McCain similarly beat Barack Obama by 12 percentage point among voters who said they attend church at least weekly. Obama led among voters who attended church less often, winning fully two-thirds of the voters (one-sixth of the total electorate) who said they never attended church.
The numbers among whites are even more dramatic. Even amid the gale force discontent of 2010, for instance, the exit poll showed that Democrats ran almost even in the vote for the House of Representatives among the 55 percent of whites who attend church less than weekly: those whites divided 51 percent to 47 percent for Republicans. But among the 45 percent of whites who did attend church at least weekly, the GOP in 2010 held an overwhelming 70 percent to 28 percent lead. Even in hard times, cultural attitudes remain a principal engine of our politics.
--Scott Bland contributed.
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