Lost Opportunity

The poll of Latino Protestants released last week by Faith in Public Life showed the biggest see-saw I've ever seen by a faith community in presidential preference: from 68-32 for Gore in 2000 to 63-37 for Bush in 2004 to 50.4 to 33.6 for Obama now. The authors properly point to anti-immigrant hostility that took over the Republican Party.in 2006 as a major cause for the shift back to the Democrats. In this regard, it's worth noting that (as John Green informs me) Latino Protestants in that year preferred Democrats running for Congress to Republicans by 53.2 percent to 46.8 percent. Thanks, in short, to Dobbsian ideology, Republicans managed to kick away a significant religious constituency that George Bush had enlisted powerfully on their side.