Understanding Religion s Role in the 2006 Election. Karlyn Bowman American Enterprise Institute. Dr. John Green Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Transcription

1 Karlyn Bowman American Enterprise Institute Dr. John Green Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life December 2006 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: We re delighted to have two of the best political demographers and interpreters of polls here with us today. DR. JOHN GREEN: Today I d like to do three things. One is work through data from the 2006 exit polls that has been cleaned up a little bit. Then I ll talk about some data on issue priorities and political contacting among religious voters. Finally, I would like to make a couple of summary comments about the role of faith groups in American elections. Let s turn to Table 1.

2 White evangelical Protestants are on the very top line of Table 1. The posted exit poll data is for white born-again Christians. In our data, we re able to separate out white mainline Protestants. This gives us a more precise look at the vote of these important religious communities, and it also allows us to look back at 2004 and 2002 with some precision. One of the weaknesses of the approach represented on this table is we were unable to separate out non-white voters. So that category of non-white voters includes black Protestants and Latino Catholics, two very important groups. In this particular election, both groups voted strongly Democratic, so combining them is not that problematic. This table and the next three tables refer to the vote for the House of Representatives. We compare the 2006 data to the 2004 and 2002 elections. The first was a presidential election, and the second was the previous midterm election. Generally speaking, white evangelical Protestants tended to stay in the Republican column, with the Democrats making some small gains. If you look at the far right-hand side of Table 1, you can see the change in the Democratic vote, from 2004 to 2006, and then from 2002 to In 2006, the Democrats made a 3-percentage-point gain over their vote in 2004 and a 2-percentage point gain over These changes were small, but in a group as large and Republican as white evangelicals, even small shifts can be important. Of course, these are national figures. This change was concentrated in certain key races. A good example would be Ohio. The data we have from Ohio is not as good as what we have from national exit polls, but there is reason to believe the governor-elect, Ted Strickland, did very well among evangelicals in that state, while basically breaking even among white Protestants as a whole. It was an important gain. We didn t see gains like that everywhere in the country, and that is why we see only a small change in the white evangelical category at the national level. This point is especially important given the large number of close elections in White Mainline Protestants showed a similar pattern to white evangelicals, about a 3- percentage-point shift. However, the shift was entirely off of 2004 and not off of

3 The big change occurred among white Catholics, and there we have two stories. One is a significant shift in the congressional vote from 2004 to 2006, a 5-percentage-point change in the Democratic column. But notice that is much less of a change from 2002 when the Republicans won this group by a small margin. We might conclude there are a lot of swing voters among white Catholics, and in 2006, they swung Democratic. But in 2004, they had swung Republican. They may swing differently in the future. The other thing to note is that even in 2006, despite a 5-percentage-point gain among white Catholics for the Democrats, the white Catholic community was still evenly divided, with 50 percent for the Democrats and 49 percent for the Republicans. If one looks at these three large white Christian communities evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics one could conclude the partisan gap in those communities narrowed because the Democrats picked up votes in each case, but especially among Catholics. But look at the rest of the table unaffiliated voters, nonwhite voters, Jews and other faiths among these groups the gap actually widened. Here religious groups that were already Democratic in 2004 and 2002 became much more Democratic in Thus, the Democrats made gains everywhere in 2006, but they made the biggest gains in groups already most in their favor. Part of what happened in 2002 was the Democrats ate into Republican religious constituencies, but they were also able to mobilize more votes from their own religious constituencies. In these data, the group that had the biggest percentage gain was Jews. It s a small community, but, again, in certain races it could have been critical, such as in the Northeast where Democrats did very well. Another one of the largest changes was among unaffiliated voters. The unaffiliated voters have tended to vote Democratic for a long time, but notice the consistent change over time from 2002 to 2004 to That is a very important change a lot of people haven t noticed. Let s turn to Table 2 and Table 3. These tables look at worship attendance, a powerful predictor of the vote. These tables measure religious behavior, which is connected to religious beliefs. The exit polls don t have any beliefs measures. Thus, we actually can t look at a God gap per se; all we can look at is a worship-attendance gap. 3

4 Table 2 looks at attendance in the way that it is typically portrayed, dividing respondents into those who attend weekly or more and those who attend less than weekly. You can see quite a difference. The weekly attenders tend to be Republican, even in 2006, and the less than weekly attenders tend to be much more Democratic. But notice the shift in the Democratic advantage across the tables. At the bottom, we calculate the gap, and even in this fairly simple measure, it was bigger in 2006 than in So while in some measures of religious affiliation, we saw the partisan gap narrow, it widened by other measures. To see what is really going on, one needs to look at Table 3, where the frequency of worship attendance is fully displayed. The Democrats made gains at all levels of frequency, but the biggest gains occurred among those who attended least. For instance, among more than weekly, they picked up about 1 percentage point over 2004 and But among respondents who say they never attend, they picked up 12 percentage points over 2002 and 7 percentage points over They also picked up 4 to 5 percentage points among weekly attenders, but that is less than they picked up among those who never attend. 4

5 This reinforces what we saw with affiliation in Table 1: while Democrats improved everywhere in 2006, they improved most among people who were already in their favor. Indeed, if one calculates an attendance gap based on this expanded attendance data, one can see it increased quite a bit (the bottom row of Table 3). For instance, in 2006, the gap in the Democratic vote is 29 percentage points between the most observant and the least observant voters. Back in 2002, it was just 18 percent. What is going on here? In 2002 and 2004, The Republicans got more votes from less observant people than they did in To put it another way, the Democrats exploited the less observant end of the attendance gap much more effectively in 2006 than they have in the past. We can put these two things together in Table 4 for the three largest Christian groups, breaking out the weekly and less than weekly attenders. 5

6 First of all, notice that in 2006, for all three of these large religious communities, weekly attenders were much more likely to vote Republican than the less than weekly attenders, who were much more likely to vote Democratic. But notice that the effects of affiliation still matter. In the evangelical community, both groups are on balance Republican, even though their weekly attenders were much more Republican. Among the white mainline Protestants, the less-than-weekly attenders are on balance Democratic. And among white Catholics, the difference by attendance is almost symmetrical, with a slight advantage for the Republicans among the weekly attenders and a slight advantage for the Democrats among the less observant. So the worship attendance gap occurs within the context of religious affiliation. Faithbased politics is complex these days in part because we have these two things going on: 6

7 the impact of affiliation, but also the impact of religious behavior, and presumably religious belief as well. Just to focus on white Catholics for a moment: notice that the Democratic gains occurred both among regular attenders and the less observant. There were shifts across the board among Catholics probably for different reasons, but it occurred in both places. Thus the attendance gap still remained between regular mass attenders and those who attend mass less often. It s just a bit narrower in 2006 than it was in the past elections. One thing these data do show is what a unique figure President Bush has been with the religious voters, among evangelicals but also among Roman Catholics and the regularworship-attending mainline Protestants. Bush has had a very special relationship with these groups and, in the 2004 race, did very, very well among them, much better than Republicans typically do. If one looks at the congressional vote, one can see a more accurate measure of the baseline partisan attachment of these religious groups. It is unlikely the Republicans will be able to repeat Bush s success with these religious groups in the near future. Let s turn to Table 5, which contains information on voter priorities in We have here two measures of voter priorities for a list of seven issues, listed down the left-hand side of the table. For each of the issues, the first row is taken from a post-election survey done by the Pew Research Center. In this question, respondents were asked to pick the most important issue to them from this list of issues. 7

8 The second row for each of these issues comes from the 2006 exit polls. Here the respondents were asked if each of these issues was extremely important, important or not important at all to their vote. The second row reports the percentage of people in the exit polls that said that particular issue was extremely important. Taken alone, these data are potentially misleading on the relative importance of any given issue to voters. But if one puts them together, as in Table 5, the two measures compliment each other. The first row in each case reveals the voter s top priority, and the second line 8

9 provides a sense of the overall importance of the issue. As you can see, people regarded lots of things as important, and not everybody in the country was a single-issue voter. The two measures show some interesting things. For instance, look at the first column in the table, the all column. When asked to choose one important issue, the war in Iraq came out on top: 29 percent said it was the single-most important issue with regard to their vote. The second issue was the economy at 21 percent and moral values came in third at 19 percent. For those of you who remember the 2004 exit polls, you ll notice it is exactly the order that occurred in that election (although the question was asked in another way). If one puts together the different questions, one can compare social issues to economic issues to foreign policy issues. If one adds terrorism to the war in Iraq category, then foreign policy was an even bigger concern. But notice the patterns if one looks only at the second row for each issue. The largest number is corruption, with Forty-one percent of the people said corruption was extremely important to their vote. Very briefly looking at the religious communities: the values voters were back in Among white evangelical Protestants, 45 percent said these value issues were the most important thing to their vote, and nearly 60 percent said they were extremely important. However, for white Catholics the single most important issue was the economy. Thirtyone percent said it was their top issue. That isn t the top in terms of the exit poll measure, but it s very close to the top issue. So among Roman Catholics, there were a lot of economic voters in And for white mainline Protestants, the top issue was the war in Iraq, on both measures. The same pattern held for the white unaffiliated and for the non-white voters. This pattern also held for Jewish voters, 100 percent of whom reported the Iraq war was the top priority. No doubt this figure reflects the very small number of Jewish respondents in the sample. 9

10 Anyway, the data shows there were different priorities among different religious groups in It makes the building of coalitions in elections complicated and exciting. It also helps explain why we have had such close elections in recent times. Let s turn to the final table, Table 6. These are measures from two Pew Research Center surveys, one right before the election and one right after the election, about the campaign contact among religious voters. The rows marked with stars are regular political contact: being contacted by a campaign by telephone, in person or by . The ones with the little crosses are religious contact, like voter guides and clergy urging people to vote. The biggest source of contact was by telephone. The other categories are quite interesting. For example, if one adds together the two forms of religious contacting then about 30 percent of the people surveyed said they were contacted that way, and that is about equal to the percent that said they were contacted either in person or by . These figures provide a sense of how important religious-base contacting is overall. It is not as important as the telephone (or for that matter television, which is not reported in the table), but it is as important as many conventional forms for campaigning. Looking briefly at the religious contact information at house of worship, white evangelicals stand out. Twenty-eight percent of them reported information was available in their houses of worship. But notice black Protestants actually had a higher number, and 10

11 24 percent of Jews said they had that kind of information in their synagogues. Either there is a big sampling error or something new is happening in the Jewish community we haven t seen before. White Catholics were about 17 percent. That is a good bit higher than it would have been in the past. So this kind of contacting occurred in many religious communities. For the really interesting figure, though, look to the bottom of the chart. Only 6 percent of white evangelical Protestants said their clergy provided them information or direction on how to vote compare that to 14 percent of white Catholics. This measure doesn t tell us the partisan bias of the clergy, but as many of you know, there was quite an effort on the part of both liberal conservative Catholics to distribute voter guides and mobilize voters in Catholic churches in this election. This may explain the uptick in such contacts among Catholics. Let me summarize. These data show a fairly clear structure for faith-based politics and elections in the United States. Both political parties have strong religious constituencies based on affiliation and attendance. Some groups are up for grabs, swinging back and forth from one election to another. It s a complicated structure, but it s clear and firm. Individual campaigns tilt that structure one way or another. In 2002 and 2004, the structure tilted in favor of the Republicans. In 2006, it tilted in favor of the Democrats. So this basic structure of faith-based voting under girds the vote, but exactly how it plays out depends upon the candidates and the issues. Thank you very much. KARLYN BOWMAN: John has provided a wonderful look at how the various religious groups voted in 2006, and how those patterns have changed in recent years. I would like to take a different tack and make three simple points today. First, as many of you already know, the God gap, while real, is only one of the many gaps in our politics and it is not the largest. Second, we see powerful continuity and stability in many questions about religion. Third, although we are polarized and divided on paper, we do not appear to be polarized in practice, and by that I don t mean religious practice; I mean in ordinary life. 11

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13 I have brought two handouts. The first handout (PDF)(Table 7 is a simplified version) looks at how different groups voted in House elections. The relevance of the first document for this session is as a reminder of those other gaps in our politics. They are larger than the God gap. In the 1960s and 1970s, we talked about the generation gap. Many people argued that young and old would be deeply divided on issues such as Social Security and that we would have generational warfare. More than 40 years later, we are still waiting for that to happen. The attention religion has received in recent years is healthy, but it is nonetheless interesting why the God gap appears to get more attention than the gap between married voters and those who are not married, between blacks and whites, between voters with a high school education and those with a post-graduate one. The religious attendance gap, which came to public attention about the same time as the gender gap in the 1970s, is fairly new, and that is surely one of the reasons for the attention. Frequent churchgoers, as John Green has pointed out, were more likely to vote for Nixon and for Reagan, but the attendance gap doesn t clearly emerge in presidential voting behavior until 1992 when we saw a double-digit attendance gap. If you look at John s Table 2 and calculate the net for the gap in attendance overall, you see in 2006 the gap between those who attended church weekly and those who did so less than weekly was 36 percentage points. That is up from 33 points in 2004 and 27 points in It is about the same size as the gap you ll see in my handout between married and non-married voters 32 points this year and smaller than the gap between voters with the lowest and highest reported incomes 37 points this year and is obviously dwarfed by the race, partisan, and ideological gaps overall. Just as a point of comparison, in Gallup s recall data from the 1960 election, there was a gap of 80 percentage points between Protestants and Catholics in the presidential vote. The second handout (PDF) is a compilation of poll data from different sources, which tells a story of remarkable stability and continuity. 13

14 As the first page of the handout shows, in 1937, 73 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they were members of a church or a synagogue (Table 8). In 2006, nearly 70 years later, that response was 64 percent. Although there are reasons to be skeptical of reported church attendance figures in polls, Gallup s question on the top right (Table 9) [about church or synagogue attendance] shows remarkable stability over nearly seven decades. The question Gallup has been asking for the past 15 years about church attendance on the bottom of the first page of the handout again shows great stability, so too the question about having a Bible in your home (Table 10). If the vast majority of our voters claim to believe in God, can belief in God be so clearly linked to political differences? The second page of the handout looks at views about how 14

15 George Bush talks about his religion and uses it in governing. But if the country were deeply polarized by God, these numbers would look much different. In the Pew trend, around a quarter think Bush talks about his religion (Table 11) too much with around about 10 percent saying too little. A solid majority say it s about right. 15

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17 There has been a decline in the proportion in the CBS question (Table 12) saying they like the way Bush talks about his religion, though it is still a bare majority. It s unclear to me whether that decline is about Bush s discussion of his religion or about a more generalized dissatisfaction with him. The CBS question at the bottom of the page (Table 13) is particularly interesting. Far more people say big business has too much influence on the Bush administration than feel that way about the religious right. The data on religion in public life on page four again suggest to me we are not deeply divided on religious matters or on the role of religion in public life. The Fox News question in the upper-left-hand corner (Table 14) shows a significant number of people think religion is under attack. The CBS question on the right (Table 15) shows more people in 2006 than 2004 think people with strong religious beliefs face discrimination. When you care deeply about something, as Americans do about their religion, you tend to worry it s under attack or losing its influence. Those aren t surprising responses. People who think religion is losing its influence in our lives and on our government leaders overwhelmingly see that as a bad thing, as the question in the middle left of the handout shows. There is strong national agreement that religion should not be excluded from public life and that the courts have gone too far in taking it out of public life. The data on the top of page four (Table 16) generally show people feel the Republican Party is more friendly to religion than the Democratic Party, but only small numbers regard either party as unfriendly. 17

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19 Solid majorities say they would be willing to vote for a black for president, or a Jew, or someone who is homosexual, but people are still divided about whether or not they would vote for an atheist for president. 19

20 The larger picture shown by all of these data suggests to me an enormous amount of stability and movement towards more tolerance and acceptance, not the divisions emphasized in the gapology literature. We see worries about religion losing its influence in public life, but overall, a public that does not appear to be deeply dissatisfied with the role that religion is playing in public life. MARK PINSKY, Orlando Sentinel: John, what might be the sweet spot for Democrats who want to turn swing states and swing districts their way? White evangelicals are my focus here: weekly attendees, self-described evangelicals who do not believe in Biblical inerrancy, and those 55 percent of white evangelicals who thought same-sex marriage and abortion were not the most important issues. If the Democrats were looking for a pool of potential peel-aways, it would be in those three categories. Would you agree? DR. GREEN: I would agree with that. The evangelical community is by no means monolithic, either in religious terms or in political terms. It is more homogeneous than some other religious communities, but there are large minorities of evangelicals that have the views you just described, and those would be exactly the targets the Democrats would want to pursue all across the country. Evangelicals tend to be very similar just about everywhere maybe a little more conservative in the South, though they have a lot of diversity there too. If the Democrats could win 35 percent of the white evangelical vote, many races, even in the South, would become very competitive. Once races are competitive, there is a chance to win them. In the big swing states of the Midwest, 35 percent of the white evangelical vote might guarantee a Democratic victory when added to Democratic groups. So, yes, Democrats do have targets of opportunity among evangelical voters, and Democrats don t have to win an absolute majority to win elections. Many Democrats in the past have not paid attention to these groups, but also they have not had the ability to target those elements of the evangelical community. The change in targeting technology has made it increasingly possible to target those sorts of people. 20

21 The Democrats did not make quite the gains in the congressional elections among evangelicals they had hoped for overall, but if you look at particular races, then you can see they did achieve something close to what you are describing. JOHN DICKERSON, Slate: The pickup for Democrats among white evangelical Protestants and white mainline Protestants seems incredibly small. If Democrats couldn t move the needle more, doesn t that tell us something about the extraordinary resiliency of the relationship between evangelicals and Republicans? The second question. How should we look at this data in the midterm election versus in the general [election], given that in the general, values issues can play a larger role? In a midterm, Democrats can run on local issues and move away from religious issues. How will campaigns pitch to voters in the general election coming, based on conclusions they may draw from this data? DR. GREEN: While Democrats did make some gains among white Protestants, evangelical and mainline Protestants, it was lower than many people expected given the wave nature of the 2006 election. There are two reasons why that didn t happen. One is that there was an extraordinary campaign to keep white Protestants, particularly evangelical Protestants, in the Republican column. In many ways, this campaign paid off. This effort was primarily done by Christian right organizations, but also by Republican Party operatives and individual Republican campaigns. It wasn t enough to prevent the Democrats from taking over the Congress, but it certainly did help hold those particular voter groups. The other reason is that Democrats had their greatest success with white Protestants, including evangelicals, where candidates worked very hard to appeal to them. I don t know if the strategies of those particular candidates could be replicated in a presidential campaign perhaps not, but they certainly could be replicated in lots of other states and localities. In some sense 2006 was a good experiment for the Democrats; they saw they can move even strongly Republican constituencies if they go about it the right way. This is going to add fuel to a debate among Democrats about how to wage campaigns, particularly when it comes to appealing to religious groups. 21

22 ROSS DOUTHAT, The Atlantic: One of the debates on the right after the election has been about the question of a backlash against the religious right and the supposed extreme religiosity of the Bush administration. It seems you have data that points in both directions. On the one hand, if you look at the issues people cite as most important (Table 5), values issues seem to be way down the list, particularly for secular voters, and Iraq and the economy are much more important. On the other hand, the data by worship attendance is really interesting (Table 2) and the fact that people who never go to church broke so heavily for the Democrats this time. Even in the data Karlyn was looking at, where people say big business has too much influence over the GOP compared to the religious right (Table 13) but you do see in the 2001 to 2003 period roughly 20 percent saying the religious right has too much influence, and then in 2005, suddenly you have 40 percent saying the religious right has too much influence. Could either of you talk about that generally? Secondly, has there been any attempt to directly ask people, Was your vote impacted by the Terri Schiavo affair or [some other specific issue]? DR. GREEN: We often talk about the problems Democrats have had assembling a coalition of seculars and religious voters, including the traditionally religious. But the Republicans have a similar problem. There are a lot of libertarian Republicans, and there are Republicans with more secular outlooks who have never been happy with the inclusion of evangelicals and other conservative religious people in their coalition. The intensity has been more on the Democratic side, but that is partly because the Republicans have been winning until recently, and parties that win have ways of smoothing over their differences more easily than parties that don t. But I have heard a lot of talk among more moderate Republicans pointing at exactly these numbers, and saying, Here is the problem. Bush won a very close, hard-fought election in Yes, he had religious conservatives, but he did well among the less religious people and that gave him enough to win. Those less religious people have been driven away. 22

23 When you look into the data though, there is not a lot of hard evidence of that pattern because more secular, moderate Republicans are focused on other types of issues, such as foreign policy or economic questions. There may well be a problem there, but most of the direct evidence doesn t suggest it s a big deal. It could be that those secular voters, those non-attenders, who flocked to the Democratic side in 2006 were doing so because of Iraq. One could reasonably conclude there is a Bush problem in these data, but whether it s the religious part of Bush s coalition or the Bush foreign policy is hard to tell. E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: There are three questions I wanted to ask. Here s my first: I was struck by the difference between white evangelical Protestants and white Catholics. It appears among white evangelicals, the non-attenders were much more open to the Democrats, whereas among white Catholics, if anything, their gains were greater among the attenders. Could you comment on that? The second thing is on [Table 7], it s striking how much more polarized the electorate is by ideology and party, than if you go back through time. Similarly on party ID, there was a lot of bleeding from the Democrats in 1980, pretty much all the way through to the 2004 election. Now you have very firm party solidarity. Then there is a big regional shift: if you look at the east and the south, you have got a kind of inversion, with real Democratic solidarity in the east, and a flip for Republicans in the south. Could both of you talk about the interaction between the regional shifts and the religion factor? The last question is, I wonder, are we talking about the importance of religion in politics at a moment when it has actually gone down? Is our whole conversation backward in that it s a very important thing because of the intensity at each end, rather than some big change that we are becoming a terribly religious country? DR. GREEN: That was very insightful, E.J., to point out the big change among the less frequently attending evangelicals. There are elements of the evangelical community open to persuasion by the Democrats. Democrats have to do the persuading, but there are some real opportunities. One of the frustrations with these data is we cannot divide up the communities with any more precision because one finds in all of these communities 23

24 lots of people in the middle. I like to call them centrists, but other people call them different things. These are people who take their faith seriously but aren t particularly doctrinaire. These folks are particularly open to persuasion. That is one place where Democrats have some real opportunities, and where they have been able to make some big gains. The situation in the Catholic community is very different, and that is because of the differences in Catholic doctrine and belief. Many traditional Catholics, regular mass attenders and so forth, come to the American party system with a great deal of ambivalence. The teachings of the Church on social issues push them towards the Republicans, but the teachings on social justice push them towards the Democrats. MS. BOWMAN: To your point, are we focusing on something that is becoming less important? I confess, I think so. Certainly it s healthy to talk about religion; it s very important in American life, but I can t quite understand the fascination with the God gap, not because I think it s less important but because so many gaps as you pointed out, the partisan gap, the ideological gap are much larger overall and play much more of an important role politically. DR. GREEN: That is what we see here: A lot of diversity on issues, but a polarized vote. Religion does play a role in that polarization, but it is complicated. E.J., you pointed out regional effects. Part of what is happening is white Southerners have become very Republican. Some of that change is for religious reasons, and some of it is for economic reasons. Meanwhile, the Northeast is becoming very Democratic. Some of that is for religious reasons; some of that is for other reasons. Religion operates as part of the regional context, and regional context has its own power. We see the same thing with partisanship. Some of the most intensely secular people in the United States have become strongly Democratic. Some of the most intensely religious people are very Republican, but many members of most religious traditions are somewhere in the middle, with partisan leanings, but open to persuasion from either side. So religion becomes important when a lot of other pieces of the political puzzle are in 24

25 motion at the same time. It s often hard to parse out exactly what the order of causality is. MIKE ALLEN, Time: Karlyn, do you mind talking about the other gaps you think are changing and are maybe more significant? Also, do you have any thoughts about these shocking journalists and the public numbers? MS. BOWMAN: The gap is 103 points on that question about which comes closer to your own views, even if neither is exactly right. There is a chasm between journalists and the public. One of the reasons the God gap gets so much attention is probably because many journalists themselves are interested and feel a little uncomfortable with the whole issue, and see themselves as being very different from the public as a whole. As to other gaps, I m looking at some of the ones Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have identified as the groups they think are going to move most significantly in the Democrats direction: the married/single gap, and the growth of singles in the electorate. It is going to take time for singles to grow substantially, but they are going more and more Democratic; they certainly did in this election. [Teixeira and Judis] are looking at Latinos. I think we have overestimated significantly Latino s participation in elections; again, that one is going to take time. That group is going to be a very volatile voting block because, and this is a gross generalization, it s a much more emotional voting block, drawn to people.. That group is going to move around. They also are looking at post-graduates who are leaning more and more Democratic over time. These are three groups I am looking at. JAY TOLSON, U.S. News & World Report: Is there any application of age cohort voting patterns to these marvels, particularly within the religious groups? Do young, frequentattending white evangelicals tend to be more fluid in moving toward the Democrats? MS. BOWMAN: Age voting is interesting. What interested me most in this election was the 65 and older [category] that broke evenly and were the Republicans best group. That was something we didn t expect given all the coverage of Medicare Part D and other issues. 25

26 Younger people, Democratic leaning in most elections, turned out in higher numbers in We don t know whether they turned out in significantly higher numbers in the House elections yet. Young people today have the largest Democratic edge we have seen in a very, very long time. They are a peculiar generation. There is a Reagan-era generation, that is people who came of age politically during Reagan s presidency, that still looks more Republican than the generations that came before or after them. CARL CANNON, National Journal: A lot of the Democratic scare talk about a theocracy is taking its toll. How would you continue to push this vote, which you need, which alone might have given Congress to the Democrats, while appealing to this other very different [religious] group at the same time? I m not sure you can do that. DR. GREEN: Democrats have been struggling with this dilemma because the more secular constituencies are important to them. Part of the issue here is geography. The unaffiliated population tends to be concentrated in the East and West Coasts, areas where Democrats are already doing well and did particularly well in Part of what Democrats have been worrying about, appropriately so from a strategic point of view, is how to be competitive in the Midwest and the South. In presidential politics, making Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina competitive is important because even if they end up losing them on Election Day, just making them competitive changes the dynamics of the campaign. The gains Democrats experienced among the less religious, the more secularized population, was an important part of the 2006 story, but the distribution of those individuals might not help them as much in a presidential campaign. BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: A friend of mine called Tom Schaller wrote a book, Whistling Past Dixie. The basic thesis is the Democrats can just forget about the South. I m wondering whether the Democrats might be able to forget about the evangelicals, too. 26

27 DR. GREEN: The Democrats can do anything they want. First of all, the Democrats do have to worry about the Midwest, and the Midwest has lots of evangelicals. Secondly, these younger, less doctrinaire evangelicals are nonetheless evangelicals. They have to be pursued if the Democrats want their votes. But thirdly, it is probably a bad idea for a national party to write off whole regions. It might well be that Alabama is unreasonable for Democratic presidential candidates, but Alabama is not the entire South. Likewise, it would be a big mistake for Republicans to write off the entire Northeast. Certain portions of the Northeast may be beyond their reach, but there are places where they could do well. Even if it s only to make the other side defend their base, it s very important in presidential elections to compete in all regions. If elections come down to the Democrats basically ignoring the South and winning by winning only the available states, Democratic campaigns become very risky propositions. It doesn t mean they will lose, but it means they have shrunken the playing field. So the third reason they should pay attention to evangelicals is to expand the playing field. JANE LITTLE, BBC: How much do you think we re going to see in 2008 the Democrats continuing and even ramping up the strategy of reaching out to religious voters? Are we going to hear Biblical quotes flying between Obama and Hillary Clinton? What are the dangers, the pitfalls, for the Democrats in their religious outreach effort? DR. GREEN: We re going to hear a lot about faith and values from the Democrats and the Republicans in But you have to think about it in three different pieces. First of all, there is the Democratic presidential primary. My sense is there are Democratic presidential campaigns being predicated on appealing to religious voters of one kind or another. That has to do with how one assembles a winning coalition in the primary. Once the nomination has been settled, then of course the general election comes, and there will be a lot of focus on appealing to religious voters. How much will depend on who the nominee is, of course. So there are three different levels where we ll see the role of faith play out in 2008: in the party structure, in the presidential primary campaign and in the general election. It is too 27

28 early to tell exactly what it will look like, but these numbers suggest there are religious groups in motion. Clearly Democrats would like to get their share of those votes. BYRON YORK, National Review: This is about John s Table 5 on the importance of issues. Could either one of you talk about why the number of white evangelicals who thought Iraq mattered most was so much smaller than everybody else, with the exception of white Catholics? I thought that 17-percent number was quite low. DR. GREEN: White evangelicals have been among the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq. Back when most Americans supported the war in Iraq, they were the strongest supporters, and they still are the strongest supporters, even though their numbers have declined substantially. It s not at all untypical today to find white evangelicals 15 to 20 points more supportive of the war than Americans as a whole. I m not sure that s because white evangelicals were particularly interested in the war in Iraq; I think it s because they were particularly interested in President Bush. They really like him, and so they backed his foreign policies. By the way, their views on the war in Iraq track their views of his job performance, and they are still among his strongest supporters overall. To me that number makes sense. It was just not a high priority for them given the investment they had in Bush. The number of white Catholics who said the war in Iraq was the one issue that mattered most, frankly, did surprise me. I thought it would be higher because that s a community that has not been as supportive of the war in Iraq and was one of the first communities to fall away as the war begin to lose its popularity. Many Catholic religious leaders had been against the war from the beginning, and maybe some parishioners are coming to see the wisdom of their position. So that number was more puzzling to me than the evangelicals. KATHY SLOBOGIN, CNN: The percentage of people who consider the United States a Christian nation has gone from 60 percent to 67 percent since That s about a 10 percent rise. Is that evidence of anything? 28

29 DR. GREEN: Yes, I think so. That question needs to be interpreted very carefully. Most of what that question is telling us is people s sense of who the other people in the country. If you ask people, is the United States a Christian nation, the response seems to be, Yes, most of the people in the United States are Christians. One of the reasons we think those numbers have increased is because there s been this increased discussion of religion, particularly by Christian groups. DAN GILGOFF, U.S. News & World Report: Is there any evidence either of you have seen that the appeal to black voters by Republican candidates or by the party, particularly on these social conservative issues, is bearing any fruit? MS. BOWMAN: In some races in some states, they ve done better. If you look at the Joint Center studies, younger African-Americans are considerably less Democratic. They re not more Republican; they re independents. They re moving slowly, but there is an opportunity with younger African-Americans who feel differently about the Democratic Party. The Republicans have had some successes in individual races, but in a close race, any group can make the difference, so you use whatever arrows you have in your quiver. But it is a monolithically Democratic vote at this point. ERIC GORSKI, The Denver Post: Looking at the results this year, what do these things says about the so-called wedge issues? DR. GREEN: My reading of the poll evidence from 2004, and a lot of anecdotal evidence from interviewing Catholic leaders and laity, is there was a pretty negative reaction to the heavy-handed tactics of some of the bishops and priests. But a lot depends on what s at the top of the agenda. Certainly, many Catholics still oppose abortion and did so in 2006, but the 2006 election wasn t really about abortion for many people. It was about other issues. I don t think we ll see this emphasis on conservative social issues go away, but its importance will rise and fall given what else is happening in particular elections. I don t know that the same-sex marriage amendments tell us very much about wedge issues in general, but they do tell us something about the issue of same-sex marriage. Americans continue to oppose same-sex marriage by solid majorities. On the other hand, 29

30 people s attitudes towards things like civil unions are changing rapidly. Part of the issue here is the sense of immediacy. What made that question so important in 2004 was samesex marriage had just been legalized in Massachusetts, and out in San Francisco, gay people were being married, apparently in contradiction to state law. That sense of immediacy was largely gone in A bit of the immediacy came back towards the end of the campaign with the New Jersey Supreme Court decision, but even then, it didn t reach the same level. MS. BOWMAN: The polling data were clear. If you look at the large variety of questions on whether or not we should amend the constitution, the public was skeptical of that idea. Many Americans wanted this to go away. It was not only losing the immediacy, but a public that was also divided on some aspects of it. MS. HAGERTY: Do you see any indication conservative evangelicals might feel so disappointed with George Bush and politics in general that they might withdraw, as they have in the past, from the political arena? DR. GREEN: Conservative evangelicals are very unhappy with the GOP right now. They re less unhappy with President Bush than they are with the party as a whole. But I don t see any indication they are about to withdraw from politics. As much as they are unhappy with the Republican Party, they see the Democratic Party as worse. At least for the next election cycle, they will stay activated. MR. YORK: What religious leaders do you find truly influential, who people should be listening to? Could you could comment on Rick Warren? DR. GREEN: Rick Warren is part of a new generation of leaders in the evangelical community who want a broader agenda. They are not willing to abandon the hot-button social issues; maybe they want to make them a little less hot, but they re unwilling to abandon them because they believe in them. However, they want to broaden the agenda to other kinds of issues. The public explanation is biblical values apply to a lot of things and not just to sexuality, as important as that may be. But there is a subtext that is not always public, which is, We might have more progress on some of these other things, 30

31 because we can make alliances with people in other religious traditions. We can reach across the aisle. This represents not only a generational change but also a maturation of the evangelical community in politics, an understanding that politics is an ongoing phenomenon in which today s enemies are tomorrow s friends, an understanding that one has to be practical about politics. There is about to be a major change in evangelical leadership because of generational change. Right now I think James Dobson is the single most influential evangelical leader. Of course, he s not a religious leader: he s not a denominational leader or a pastor. But he s not going to be around forever. So there s a lot of flux in the evangelical community. Someone like Rick Warren could potentially have enormous influence on this broadening of the agenda. But one of the reasons Rick Warren could have influence is precisely because he holds very traditional views on the basic things evangelicals agree on. Outside of the evangelical community, it s different. The Catholic community has an institutionalized leadership. We re going to see the Catholic bishops speaking up on a lot of issues in the near future not that they ve been silent in the recent past. There does seem to be turmoil among mainline Protestants. We ll see a lot of their leaders speaking out. When you talk about mainline Protestants speaking out, that means on both sides, because there are real divisions in those churches. I see a lot of turmoil among the leadership of these major religious communities, and I m not sure it will be sorted out by MR. COOPERMAN: John, what s the evidence, if any, of growth in those that might be labeled the religious left? DR. GREEN: The term religious left is fraught with all kinds of definitional issues. There are at least two groups of people that fit under that label. There are people who have very liberal theology together with very progressive politics. Some evidence in our surveys and other people s surveys suggest that group of people is somewhat larger than it was a few years ago. I don t know that the religious side has grown so much as the political side has. This group of people has become more politicized in the last few years. 31

32 In the other group are people who are either moderate or perhaps even conservative theologically, but who adopt liberal political positions. In some ways, Jim Wallis would be an example of that. We don t see that growing very much, but it s always been there. It seems to be really stable. If those two groups could get together, you could have a pretty significant bloc of voters. Remember, religious blocs in the United States tend to be small it s such a diverse country. Our 2004 surveys showed something like 9 percent of the American public fit under the core definition of the religious left if you disregarded denominational background; another 9 percent or so were peripheral to the definition. We haven t had a chance to look this year, but my sense is it might be even bigger now, because there has been a tremendous effort on the political side. MR. GOLDBERG: I have a question about secular Americans who are so secular it s almost a religion. Could you talk about trends in that area? DR. GREEN: The number of unaffiliated people in the United States has been growing fairly steadily for a while now. It took a big leap in the 1990s. The best surveys show it to be about a sixth of the adult population. Not all unaffiliated people are the hardcore seculars you are talking about; many of them actually have religious beliefs of one kind or another. Probably the largest group of the unaffiliated are people simply indifferent to religion. They re not hostile to it, just indifferent. But the militant secular group does seem to be growing. One piece of evidence is the number of self-identified atheists, which is going up. It s over 1.5 percent of the adult population in many surveys. But if you add the agnostics and the atheists together, they re about 3 percent of the population. Measures of hostility to religion are very high among that group. Three percent, how important is that? That s larger than the Jewish community. That s about the size of all nominal Catholics that is, people who claim to be Catholic, but don t report any Catholic beliefs or behaviors. So, atheists and agnostics are a small but a significant group. Atheists and agnostics tend to be well educated. They re probably more 32