[Number 6, about Catholics, is the most surprising and encouraging. They are, after all, 25% of the electorate. In this context, the unprecedented denial of sacrament by certain conservative bishops seems more like a furious lashing out by a minority which fears it is soon to be overwhelmed.]
Public Opinion Watch by Ruy Teixeira June 2, 2004
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Interesting Facts about Religion and Politics
Ryan Lizza, "Mythical Evangelicals, Skeptical Catholics," New Republic Web site, May 26, 2004 (http://www.tnr.com/blog/campaignjournal?pid=1697)
Ryan Lizza, in the article cited above, reports on a recent (May 23-25) conference on religion and politics hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. That conference included a presentation by John Green of the University of Akron, perhaps the leading academic analyst of this topic, on preliminary results from the 2004 National Survey on Religion and Politics (NSRP). The release of these findings, some of which are cited below, makes it a good time to review salient facts about the relationship between religion and politics.
1. Most progressives are religious. For example, in 2000, 81 percent of Gore voters professed a religious affiliation. That's within shouting distance of the 89 percent of Bush voters who professed a religious affiliation (2000 NSRP).
2. It is true that progressives attend church less frequently than conservatives. In the 2000 Voter News Service (VNS) exit poll, 33 percent of Gore voters said that they attended church once a week or more, compared to 49 percent of Bush voters who said that they attended church that often. (Note that both figures are probably too high-VNS data show levels of attendance that are inconsistent with all other data sources-but the magnitude of attendance difference between Gore and Bush voters is probably about right.)
But the whole U.S. population is trending toward less observance, not more. For example, in surveys taken over the past thirty years, it is the ranks of those who never or rarely attend church that have grown the most. According to a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study, those who said that they never attended church or attended less than once a year went from 18 percent in 1972 to 30 percent in 1998. Confirming this latter figure, the National Election Study found that those who say that they never attended was at 33 percent of the citizenry and 27 percent of voters in 2000. That is a group about twice the size of those who identify themselves as members of the religious right, and it is a group that has tended vigorously to support Democrats rather than Republicans.
Indeed, according to the NORC study, if you add to the 30 percent mentioned above those who say they attend church only once or a few times a year, it turns out that about half the U.S. population attends church only a few times a year or less.
3. In the 2000 VNS exit poll, it was widely noted that Bush won the support of voters who say that they attend church more than weekly by 63 percent to 36 percent and voters who say that they attend church weekly by 57 percent to 40 percent. And these voters made up 43 percent of the electorate. But even according to these unusually high VNS figures, the more observant groups were only a bit over two-fifths of the electorate. Each of the groups in the less observant three-fifths of voters-those who said they attended church a few times a month, a few times a year or never-preferred Gore over Bush, with support particularly strong among never-attenders, who gave Gore a 61 percent to 32 percent margin.
4. Not all evangelicals are conservative Republicans. Far from it. In the 2000 NSRP, a large subgroup of white evangelicals-"less observant" white evangelicals (about one quarter of white evangelicals and 7 percent of all voters)-supported Bush by only 55 percent to 45 percent. And in 1996, the same group either split their votes between Clinton and Dole or actually supported Clinton, depending on which survey you look at.
Early 2004 NSRP data from this spring use a different categorization ("traditional," "centrist," and "modernist," evangelicals) and also show a progressive group of evangelicals-the modernists, about one-sixth of evangelicals. This group actually supports Kerry over Bush by nine points (46 percent to 37 percent).
5. Karl Rove has claimed that there were four million evangelicals who didn't go to the polls in 2000, but who can be turned out in 2004. This is an urban legend. There is, in fact, no evidence that evangelicals' turnout in 2000 was particularly low (it was about at the national average) and that, therefore, there are, in any meaningful sense, "missing" evangelicals in the voting pool.
John Green has said that these missing evangelicals Rove alludes to are more "mythical" than missing. And, to the extent that they might really exist, he believes that they are far more likely to be in solid red states than in contested battleground states.
6. Conservatives and the GOP have made aggressive efforts to target Catholics. But there is no evidence that this targeting is actually working. "Traditional" Catholics, to be sure, are strongly supporting Bush (60-30), according to the 2004 NSRP data. But they are only 27 percent of all Catholics. The rest of Catholics-73 percent-are supporting Kerry. The includes the "modernist" group (31 percent of Catholics) who support Kerry by a lop-sided 61-33 and the "centrist" Catholics-who are both the largest (42 percent) Catholic group and the real swing group among Catholics-who support him by 45-41.
More broadly, there is little evidence that centrist and modernist Catholics, which is the overwhelming majority of Catholics-including among Hispanics-are likely to vote the conservative social positions of the Catholic church on issues like abortion or gay marriage. That is what the GOP has been banking on, but it is highly unlikely to happen. Polling data suggest strongly that these Catholics are far more concerned and moved electorally by other issues, such as the economy, education, health care and so on.
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Michael