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The Religion Factor in the 2008 Election” ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “The Religion Factor in the 2008 Election” Dr. John C. Green Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Michael Barone U.S. News & World Report E.J. Dionne Jr. The Washington Post; Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life December 2007 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: John is perhaps the best political demographer of voting behavior of religious believers in America. John is also a senior fellow with the Pew Forum, and he’s also the director of the Ray Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and distinguished professor of political science at the University of Akron. He’s written numerous books on our topic. DR. JOHN C. GREEN: Thank you, Michael, for having me back. What I’d like to do today is look at some survey data. I’d like to work through a number of tables, which I think reveal some interesting things about the role of faith in the upcoming presidential election. There are three things I’d like to discuss this morning. The first is how the structure of religion and politics works in American elections these days, and whether or not it may persist into the 2008 election. Secondly, I’d like to look at a couple of the influences that might have an effect on the structure of religion’s impact on the vote, particularly people’s attitudes toward religious expression in political campaigns, and, then, the issue priorities of the different religious groups. Finally I’d like to make a few general comments about religious groups in the primaries. So if I could turn your attention to Table 1. This is a list of religious groups and how they voted in the 2004 presidential election. It reports the two-party vote, and this comes from the 2004 national exit polls. The point of this table is to set a baseline for our discussion ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “The Religion Factor in the 2008 Election” Dr. John C. Green, Michael Barone and E.J. Dionne December 2007 by noting what happened in the last election. If you look in the middle of the chart, there’s a column called “All,” and that reflects the numbers for the entire sample, or, in this case, the entire electorate, that is all the people who voted in 2004. As you can see, Bush won the election by a very small margin. These religious groups are arrayed according to the two-party vote. Above the “All” column, toward the top of the page, we have the groups that voted more for George Bush. Then toward the bottom of the table we have groups that voted more for John Kerry. Just a very quick glance at the table will reveal three groups. The Republicans have strong religious constituencies. The Democrats have strong religious constituencies, and there are some groups in the middle. In 2004 Bush won those groups in the middle, at least the ones we’re going to look at here today. But let me just spend a moment talking about these religious categories. They are a little different than the ones you sometimes see from me or the Pew Forum. It is the same data; it’s just arranged in a different way. The reason is so we can look across surveys. Not all surveys have exactly the same number of religious categories, and we quickly reach a point where certain small religious groups become statistically insignificant in one or another of the surveys. We want to work with categories that have a “minimum significance” in as many tables as possible. Up at the very top of the table we have the group that everyone talks about, sometimes referred to as the “religious right.” At the core of that group are weekly attending white evangelical Protestants. In these surveys, evangelicals are defined as born-again Protestants. Here we separate out whites and people who tell us they attend worship once a week or more often. One of the important elements of the faith factor these days is religious affiliation, and most of these groups are defined by affiliation. Race and ethnicity are very closely connected to religious affiliation, so they’re part of the definition for many of these groups. But there’s another element present and that is religiosity, and in these surveys we measure that with worship attendance. That’s not the only way, or maybe even the best way to measure religiosity, but it’s a very common and effective way. 2 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “The Religion Factor in the 2008 Election” Dr. John C. Green, Michael Barone and E.J. Dionne December 2007 So if you look at the very top group, weekly attending white evangelicals, notice that 82.4% of them said they voted for President Bush in 2004. But if you go down just two lines to less-observant white evangelical Protestants — these are white born-again Protestants who claim not to attend church once a week or more often — notice they also voted for Bush, but by a good bit less, in fact, about 11 percentage points less. So there you see both the effects of affiliation and religiosity: being a white evangelical Protestant moves one in a Republican direction, but being a regular worship attender moves one further along in a Republican direction. If you go a little farther down, one of the next groups is weekly attending non-Latino Catholics. These are basically white Catholics, but we did include Asians and African- Americans, who are a very small portion of that community. Notice that they voted a little more than three-fifths for Bush. But if we go down just a little bit farther we come to less- observant white Catholics, who Bush won by a small margin, just 53% of the vote. There again, you see the attendance gap. Another religious group are white mainline Protestants. This group isn’t defined very well in these surveys, but they are very distinctive nonetheless. These are white non-born- again Protestants, and you can also see differences by attendance in those groups. We [also] have to have a couple of composite categories. If you look way up at the top, [to] the second line on the table, you will see weekly attending other Christians. Those are Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, Unitarians, and also Latino Protestants. Normally we wouldn’t combine all those groups, but because of the size of the samples we’re going to look at, we have to. In 2004 all those groups tended to vote Republican, so putting them together is not quite as big a violation of common sense as it might seem. But notice even among these “Other Christians,” there’s a big attendance effect. Those who report attending regularly were much more for Bush than those who were not. Down toward the bottom of the table there are some other groups: the unaffiliated, people who don’t have a religious affiliation; the other faiths, that’s also a combination of different groups, mostly non-Christian groups, including Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and other sorts of groups, which again we combined — normally we would break them out, but today for pragmatic purposes we have to put them together. Then 3 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “The Religion Factor in the 2008 Election” Dr. John C. Green, Michael Barone and E.J. Dionne December 2007 of course we have black Protestants, that is, members of historically black Protestant churches. As you can see, there was quite a bit of polarization in 2004, based upon these religious categories of affiliation and attendance, with Bush doing very well with some groups, Kerry doing very well with others, and some groups in the middle, including less- observant white Catholics and less-observant mainline Protestants, which were very much up for grabs all throughout the campaign, and Bush ended up winning them by a small margin. In places like Ohio that might very well have made the difference. Table 1 shows what happened in 2004, and we can see the structure of religion when it comes to the vote, with both affiliation and attendance mattering in important ways. Table 2 comes from a survey that was taken in January of 2007, just about a year ago, by the Pew Research Center. The survey asked people about their generic party preferences. Would they be more likely to vote for a Republican candidate for president in 2008 or for a Democratic candidate? Now there are no candidates in this question, it is just a party preference. Two things immediately become clear. One is that the Republicans don’t do nearly as well in this survey as George Bush did in 2004, and there is a very striking diminution of support for a generic Republican candidate. Some respondents are in the “No Opinion” column because not everyone had made up their mind about the 2008 election. Let me call your attention to a couple of things. First of all, look at the “All” column in the middle of Table 2. Look at the Democratic vote. In this survey 49.2% of the respondents said they wanted to vote for a Democratic candidate. Now just compare that back to the actual vote that John Kerry got, according to the exit polls in 2004. It was 48.5%. Statistically, those are the same numbers. So the Democratic vote doesn’t vary very much in aggregate between these two data points: one, the actual vote in 2004, and two, this generic party ballot in 2007. The change is really on the Republican side, which is what you might expect because the Republicans, after all, won in 2004, and then they had a lot of bad luck afterwards, perhaps some of it of their own making.
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