There has been a lot of post election analysis and spinning of results every which way. That's all utterly normal. But it is important to try to figure out what went right and what went wrong, even in a year when so many things went right for Dems and wrong for Republicans.
One point of controvery over which elements of the Democratic Party went forward was various "faith outreach" schemes. While there is nothing inherently wrong with reaching out to just about any pool of voters, this language was mostly a smoke screen for a concerted effort at targeting white evangelicals who had previously voted republican. One aspect of this campaign was the promotion of the now infamous Rick Warren as a supposed "new evangelical," or a "moderate." To do this required turning a blind eye (to be generous) to his flagrant Religious Rightism -- including participation in White House sponsored political strategy teleconferences with the leaders of the Religious Right.
For the past few years, many of us questioned the down playing of reproductive rights, LGTB civil rights and separation of church and state as urged by various "faith gurus" and others in the religious industrial complex. Their professed reasoning was not to alienate white evangelicals. We were and remain concerned that the rhetorical retreat on basic values suggested a substantive retreat as well. The recruiting, fielding and heavy financing of 12 explicitly antiabortion candidates by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee adds substance to that concern.
Last month, Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst of the progressive think tank Political Research Associates and I collaborated on an analysis as a web- only feature for The Public Eye magazine. Chip did the number crunching and made the nice charts in the original article. Here is an excerpt:
Culture Wars, Evangelicals, and Political Power: Lessons from the 2008 Presidential Election
It would be nice if conservative White evangelicals called off the Culture Wars that they started and continue to aggressively pursue. It would be even nicer if liberal (and even some progressive) pundits stopped prematurely announcing the end of the Culture Wars and the demise of the Christian Right. Neither is likely to happen any time soon.
What progressives need to do is convince centrist Democratic Party honchos to end their quixotic quest for "values voters" among the rank and pew of conservative evangelical and Roman Catholic voters by sounding a rhetorical retreat on social issues such as reproductive justice and LGBTQ equity. That’s not exactly what the Obama campaign did, but it is what centrist Democratic Party consultants and their anti-abortion evangelical allies advocated. Whether the rhetorical retreat turns into a policy retreat remains to be seen.
Some Democratic political wonks who study polls and electoral outcomes have been selling, wittingly or unwittingly, a dubious narrative about the role of White evangelicals for several years now. It is time to take a close look at their product. There is convincing evidence that over the past 20 years a small percentage of White Christian evangelicals are swing voters when the Democratic Party stakes out clear and strong stands concerning peace, a fair economy, political corruption, a clean environment, and other issues that most Christians see as "moral values." Many of these swing voters, however, remain rigid in their opposition to abortion and gay rights.
Instead of agreeing to disagree in a principled way on these hot button social issues, since 2004 we have seen what Reverend Daniel Schultz (blogging online as "pastordan" of Street Prophets) calls "the endless parade of Religious-Industrial Complex consultants and activists who tell us that Rick Warren is the epitome of the ‘moderate Evangelical’ that Democrats should be working to attract." Warren may have an avuncular public persona, but he is hardly a progressive or even a progressive ally. Indeed, journalist Sarah Posner recently noted for example, that "Warren has argued that homosexuality disproves evolution and has compared prochoice advocates to Holocaust deniers." As progressives we should be reaching out to people of faith, including evangelicals, but we need clearer criteria for those with whom we seek to work.
What Actually Happened?
Looking at early exit poll data, Damon Linker of The New Republic observed that in terms of "the roughly 26 percent of Americans who describe themselves as white evangelical/born again Protestants," the efforts of "Obama, who aggressively courted these voters with religious appeals...must be judged a disappointment." And Linker adds that a "glance at Obama’s success at wooing white Catholic voters, who make up roughly 19 percent of the electorate, reveals results only slightly less sobering." His caution holds up when we look at some more pre- and post-election data.
What pollsters call "The God Gap," is the range between the percentages in a specific religious demographic group voting Republican or Democratic between two elections. If the God Gap increases while the percentage of voters choosing the Democratic Party candidate shrinks, it reveals not only the small but important number of religious swing voters, but also a major a failure of the Democratic Party to make a compelling case for its overall policies to a broad range of religious voters. See the God Gap in 2004 among White evangelicals and Protestant voters who attend church at least once a week, so-called "High Attendees," when President George W. Bush crushed Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry in this demographic.
Note these charts [see charts in the original article] do not track the Christian Right. The Christian Right over the past 30 years has been roughly 15 percent of voters. The core of the Christian Right, electorally speaking, is conservative High Attendee White Protestant evangelicals. There is no reason to suspect this figure has changed dramatically, and as yet unreleased in-depth polling may eventually give us the percentage for 2008.
Obama picked up a higher percentage of voters in each category—Whites, Protestants, Evangelicals, and High Attendees—than did Democratic candidate Kerry in 2004, and reduced several key "God Gaps."
The voting patterns in 2004, however, were atypical, and made for an unusual election in terms of exit polls. Kerry was a very unpopular Democratic candidate for many centrist voters, in part because of vicious smear campaigns waged by conservatives. At the same time, Bush was very popular among White evangelicals, drawing 78 percent.
By comparing the Gore vote in the 2000 election with the Obama vote in the 2008 election a different picture emerges. For example, among White Protestants, Obama did two points better than Kerry, but the same as Gore, as both Gore and Obama picked up 34 percent of the White Protestant vote. In 2000, however, Gore attracted 30 percent of the more specific White evangelical vote based on some estimates, while Obama only garnered 24 percent in 2008, a loss of 6 points for Obama.
Where Obama in 2008 did especially well was with moderate Protestants, Roman Catholics, and evangelicals (the latter being mostly Protestant but including some Catholics). Comparing Obama’s numbers with Gore’s reveals a small but significantly higher number of High Attendance churchgoers voted for the Democrat Obama in 2008—39 percent for Gore compared to 43 percent for Obama—a 4 point gain for Obama; however, many of these voters are devout Roman Catholics who are Latina/o, a growing demographic.
There are several indicators that McCain failed to fully mobilize evangelicals in general. Karl Rove speculates that more than four million High Attendees who "voted in 2004 stayed home in 2008. They represented half the margin between Obama and McCain." Bush carried 78 percent of White evangelicals in 2004, while McCain only attracted 74 percent of White evangelicals in 2008. With Protestant High Attendees, Bush pulled 70 percent in 2004 to McCain’s 67 percent in 2008.
Regional differences are very significant for White voters. Ten of the 16 states where 60 percent or more such voters picked McCain were members of the old Confederacy that fought for the South during the Civil War. Six of those states seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration, reports scholar Howard Schuman. Large numbers of fundamentalist Christians also reside in these states, raising the issue of whether it is race or religion or both that guides the voting patterns here.
Wishful Thinking versus Reality Check
A January 2008 study by the Barna Group of Americans identifying themselves as "born again" (including theological evangelicals in this sample) reported they were "more concerned than were non-born again adults about illegal immigration (68 percent), abortion (67 percent), the content of television and movies (60 percent), homosexual lifestyles (51 percent), and homosexual activists (49 percent).
As the election heated-up, however, reports surfaced stressing that younger evangelicals were changing. In June 2008, the New York Times reported that some "17 percent of the nation’s 55 million adult evangelicals are between the ages of 18 and 29, and many are troubled by the methods of the religious right and its close ties to the Republican Party." The Times cited a Barna Group study which found that "47 percent of born-again Christians ages 40 and under believed that ‘the political efforts of conservative Christians’ posed a problem for America."
Just before the election, pollster Robert P. Jones conducted a survey for the liberal Washington, D.C. think tank, Faith in Public Life. The study showed that younger White evangelicals are more tolerant (by small margins) than their elders, and considerably more skeptical of the power brokers of the Religious Right. Good news, but hardly evidence that the Culture Wars are over. Yet the spin doctors turned a pig’s ear into a silk purse. "Survey: Culture War Truce on the Horizon" was an October 2008 Washington Post headline based on the Jones survey. The Post reported that in the then-upcoming election, the Culture Wars "may be on the wane" or perhaps "shifting or weakening." The Post quoted Jones as stating, "What we see is younger Americans, including younger Americans of faith -- they are not the culture war generation... [they] are bridging the divides that have entrenched the older generation."
Only the most optimistic interpretation might suggest such claims were accurate. Even the executive summary of the survey data admitted "Young white evangelicals are strongly opposed to abortion rights with two thirds saying that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases."
In this pre-election survey, White evangelicals leaned 25 percent for Obama and 68 percent for McCain (7 percent others). The final election polling showed 24 percent for Obama, 74 percent for McCain. Among young White evangelicals, ages 18 to 34 the pre-election figure was 29 percent Obama, and 65 percent for McCain (6 percent Others).
Obama apparently made some small gains among younger evangelical voters, and made small but significant gains over Kerry among all religious voters in states where the campaign targeted appeals to moderate Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Obama essentially returned the Democrats to their percentages garnered by Gore among these groups in the 2000 campaign.
Roman Catholics are about 25 percent of the electorate, and from this group Obama culled 54 percent of the vote to McCain’s 45 percent. "Most of the Catholic boost for Mr. Obama came from Hispanic Catholics, who are now 6 percent of the electorate," Laurie Goodstein reported in The New York Times.
But lost in the heated run up to the election was another important story in the Times. Back in June the Times’ Neela Banerjee had debunked claims about a major shift in the evangelical youth vote as liberal wishful thinking. After agreeing that younger evangelicals were critical of the older generation, and were concerned about issues such as "care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V.," she observed,
None of that means younger evangelicals have abandoned the core tenets of their faith, including a belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus and the literal truth of the Bible. They think abortion and homosexuality are sins.
And so far, there is no clear evidence that supporting a broader social agenda has led young evangelicals to defect from the Republican Party in great numbers, as many liberals have predicted.
John Mark Reynolds, a professor of philosophy at the evangelical Biola University in La Mirada, California, told the Times that "This is the most pro-life generation I’ve seen... I don’t have any evidence that being green is going to trump pro-life issues in the voting booth."