Recently in God Gap Category

The Religion News Service consigns it to the Dept. of Things We Already Knew, but Gallup's new survey of religion and party i.d. is more noteworthy than that. For starters, it makes clear that the God Gap (i.e. the preference of the more religious for Republicans and the less religious for Democrats) is almost entirely confined to non-Hispanic whites. Although Hispanics are also more likely to identify as Republicans the more religious they are, the increase is small.

Gallup's definition of "religious intensity" involves combining self-reported frequency of worship attendance with respondents' ranking of religion's importance to them. The result is four categories: highly religious, religious, less religious, and not religious. In percentage terms, the non-Hispanic white population is split down the middle, with half "highly religious" or "religious" and half less or not. The former identify as Republicans by a 25 point margin and the latter as Democrats by a 15 point margin.

What's politically important to bear in mind that religiosity on this measure is not a bell-shaped curve, with the largest number of respondents in the "religious" and "less religious" middle and fewer at the "highly religious" and "not religious ends." Rather, the big groups--roughly twice as large as the others--are "highly religious" (34 percent) and "less religious" (32 percent). In electoral politics, it's the groups in the middle that are accessible to the other side--which is to say that the Republicans' best chances are with the "less religious" and the Democrats' with the "religious" (18 percent). (The "not religious" weigh in at 16 percent.) And that's why the Gallup array is good news for the Republicans, not so much for the Democrats.

To attract more support, the GOP has a lot more folks to go after--those who don't care about religion much but don't mind darkening a church door every now and then. Downplaying abortion and gay marriage in favor of "big government," as the Republicans are doing, is the way to appeal to them. By contrast, the Democrats are limited to the fewer number of "religious."

One of the reasons strenuous Democratic efforts to demonstrate their religion-friendliness have achieved only modest results is that two out of three of the white voters they're trying to appeal to are locked-up Republicans. Witness the limited success of "common ground" religious strategies this year. That's not necessarily to say that the Dems should stop trying, but they need to scale back their expectations, if they haven't already.

The latest report is out from the 2008 Trinity American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)--a profile of the country's no-religion population. For political junkies, the big news is that whereas in 1990, Democratic Nones outnumbered Republican Nones by just 4-to-3, they now outnumber them nearly 3-1. That's because virtually all the new Nones--those born after 1973, have become either Democrats or Independents.

In broad terms, while the Nones have  increasingly come to resemble the rest of the American population in other respects (age, education, income, race, ethnicity, etc.), they've become more differentiated politically. I.e. Those who have come of age after the Republican party established its congressional majority in 1994 have stayed away from the GOP in droves. There's lots of other fascinating data in the report as well. Check it out.

What to make of the findings on political identification and church attendance in Gallup's new survey on the Flight from the GOP in the 21st century? The headline is that the only demographic group showing no flight are the frequent church attenders--those who say they go to church at least once a week. What's odd about this finding is that it does not track the shift in this group's voting behavior. By 2000, weekly attenders were preferring Republicans to Democrats in presidential and congressional elections to the tune of 60 percent to 40 percent--the famous God Gap. That 20-point margin held in 2002 and 2004 but in 2006 sunk into the low teens, where it remained in 2008. So if the weekly attenders have voted increasingly Democratic in the past decade, how come there's no sign of it in their party ID?

As this disquisition from Pew makes clear, party ID and voting patterns are different animals, with the former tending to show greater volatility (though, not, apparently, in present instance). It's important to bear in mind that the 60-40 gap among weekly attenders in  2000 translates into a 52-41 gap among Republican identifiers (including leaners) in Gallup's 2000 ID numbers. That's allowing for 11 percent who refused to give even a "leaning" preference. In 2009, the percentage of refusniks went down to 8 percent, meaning that the party ID gap among frequent attenders shrunk by three points, to 52-44.

Still and all, it's clear that the Democrats made significantly less headway among the most observant than they did among the less so. The GOP lost 9 points among those who seldom or never attend and 6 points among the nearly weekly or monthly attenders. Factoring out the non-identifiers, this means that the Democratic advantage among the least observant nearly tripled, jumping 21 points from 51-38 to 63-29; while among the pretty frequent attenders, the Dems have turned a three point deficit (43-46) into a 12 point advantage (52-40).

These latter shifts do track voting patterns, and they suggest two things; first, that the Republicans have driven the least observant voters into the arms of the Democrats; and second, that the Democratic Party's effort to show a more religion-friendly side has borne its fruit among the pretty observant. What's important to recognize is that the latter is the critical religious swing group that Democratic faith-based efforts have always been directed towards.

One way to think of that group is in terms of the abortion issue. As I recently noted, there are a lot of Americans who now call themselves "pro-life" but who support the right to abortion in some instances--according to Gallup's recent poll on the subject, over 20 percent. A large proportion of them are likely to be pretty frequent church attenders. They're the ones who have found themselves increasingly susceptible to Democratic appeals, and it's clear that President Obama will do what he can to keep them in the fold.

Update:  Chip Berlet takes the anti-common ground liberal perspective today over on Religion Dispatches.  A good try, but he's wrong from a practical political perspective, in my view. The Democratic play is to keep the pretty religious from getting scared by culture wars appeals, so they can base their votes on Democratic issues like health care and economic recovery. The left is entitled to resist the temporizing on principle. But it shouldn't kid itself about what's pragmatic.  

A newly released report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, based on post-election polling, has reanimated the debate over whether or not African Americans were responsible for the passage of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative reestablishing California's ban on gay marriage. The principal news is that 58 percent of African-American voters, not 70 percent as the exit polling reported, supported the initiative. Inasmuch as Latinos supported it at 59 percent, and twice the number of Latinos voted as African Americans, it seems that if anyone was responsible, it's them.

Of course, in a narrow election, more than one group can be deemed responsible--the narrower the election, the more groups. (If Norm Coleman had just done a better job of appealing to Minnesota's left-handed paperhangers, he might have won his senate race.) Pace Ta-Nehisi Coates, what drove the African-American angle of the story was not just the 70 percent number, but the apparent irony of one minority group turning out in force to support one of its own and in the process sticking the shiv in another minority group. Journalists cannot resist such ironies. (For a skeptical view of the new survey plus links, see here.)

Be all this as it may, the report provides some interesting analysis of the role of religion in the vote. If multivariate factor analysis is your bag, your take-away is that religiosity, measured by reported worship attendance, had less of an impact on the vote than party identification or ideology (liberal, moderate, conservative), but more than twice the impact of race or ethnicity. Me, I prefer simple cross-tabulations, and here's what these show.

While 70 percent of weekly attenders voted for Prop 8, only 37 percent of those who attend less than weekly did, for a God gap of 33 points. That's not much of a surprise. What's more striking are the differences in the gap from group to group. For Asian-Americans, it was 35 points (68-33); for whites, 34 (70-36); for Latinos, 28 (74-46); and African Americans 18 (66-48). In a word, the God gap for whites and Asians on Prop 8 was nearly twice as big as it was for African-Americans, with Latinos falling somewhere in the middle. Among frequent attenders, African Americans were the least likely to support Prop 8; among less frequent attenders, the most likely.

The point here is that religion divides African-Americans less than it does other racial/ethnic groups. In California, the culture war is above all a white and Asian thing, and that presumably goes for the rest of the country as well.

It will be widely noted that the God Gap, as measured by the partisan preference of frequent (weekly or more often) worship attenders, shrank from 20 points in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections to 12 points this time around. And some may be inclined to credit this year's focus on religious outreach by Obama and the DNC for what happened. But in fact, the shift occurred in the 2006 midterm elections. Then, what had been a 20-point preference by frequent attenders for GOP congressional candidates in 2000 and 2004 shrank to 13 points. Meanwhile, the gap among less frequent attenders bumped up from 13 points for Democratic candidates in 2004 to 25 points in 2006--the same territory as the 23 percent of less frequent attenders who went for Obama. Measured in terms of comparing frequent and less frequent attenders, then, the God Gap remains as big as ever, just with both the former and the latter both more Democratically inclined than they were in 2000-2004.

Gallup's got the skinny on the God Gap. It's what you thought. The news? Palin's done nothing to enhance McCain's margin among frequent worshiping white voters. Of course, she may turn out to have helped turn them out. But since we won't know how they would have turned out in her absence, we won't actually be able to tell.

Michael Paulson calls attention to the Gap Gap, as disclosed in the Boston Globe's new New Hampshire poll. Namely: respondents who say they attend worship once a week or more break 52-40 for McCain. The trouble is, they make up only 23 percent of the state's voting population, and all other groups break for Obama by larger margins. Result: Obama by 15.

SUSA's new Missouri poll has Obama up by eight points, 51-43. That's a 13-point turnaround from SUSA's end-of-July poll, when McCain led 49-44. Looking at worship attendance, Obama improved his standing with all SUSA categories--regular and occasional attenders, and those who almost never darken a house of worship's door. But not at the same rate. The swing with the regulars was 13 points; with occasionals, 11 points; and with the almost nevers, 20. In short, Obama has done best with the folks most likely to vote his way most everywhere--but who, in Missouri, in July, were a bit less inclined toward him than the occasional attenders. For what it's worth.

Impressive numbers (51-45) for Obama out of Virginia, including those showing him trailing McCain by only 11 points among frequent worship attenders. Among the less frequent, the gap is over 20 points. This ain't your grandfather's Dominion.

A little evidence that the God Gap has increased since Sarah Palin's nomination comes from the latest SUSA poll of Washington State. Compared to SUSA's last Washington State poll of a month ago, the gap among regular attenders has increased by three points, from 59-36 for McCain to 61-35. Among those who almost never attend, Obama's margin has grown very slightly, from 62-32 to 63-32. But the biggest shift has come among the occasional attenders, among whom Obama's margin has dropped from 57-39 to 49-41. As I noted a few days ago, that's the group that's in play, and if the addition of Palin to the ticket enables McCain to round up a significant number of them, Obama's in trouble. In Washington State, SUSA shows McCain gaining only two percent of them, while the undecides have doubled from two percent to four percent and those supporting other candidates have doubled from three percent to six percent. They're up for grabs.