Religion Watch
| Sun Nov. 9, 2008 9:21 AM PST
RELIGION WATCH....In the LA Times today, Cathleen Decker repeats the claim that Barack Obama kicked ass among religious voters this year. Let's deconstruct her argument. The first problem is that she has her facts wrong:
Exit polls showed the dramatic effect: Obama won 43% of voters who said they attend church weekly, eight percentage points higher than 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.
That's not true. Kerry won 39% of weekly churchgoers in 2004. Obama did four percentage points better than Kerry, not eight.
The second problem is that it's irrelevant. Check this out:
"Obama did better than Kerry among pretty much every religious group," said Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life who analyzed the poll results.
Even among voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians or evangelicals, a group that tends to vote Republican, Obama improved on Kerry's standing....Yet there is no doubt that secular voters were more supportive of Obama than religious ones, according to the exit poll.
So Obama did better among every religious group and he did better among seculars. Hmmm. It's almost as if Obama did better among everyone!
Which he did. He beat Kerry's overall 2004 total by 4.3 percentage points, which means that doing four points better among weekly churchgoers doesn't mean a thing. What's more, the reason he did even that much better is pretty obvious: blacks and Latinos, who are heavy churchgoers, voted strongly for Obama this year — and needless to say, that had nothing to do with Obama's outreach to the religious community. (In fact, Obama underperformed with white evangelicals.) Decker mentions this, but then plows right through to provide nearly a thousand additional words of anecdotal explanation for Obama's nonexistent surge of support among churchgoers.
Please. Can we stop this? I know we all need stories, and liberals are hungry for evidence that we're making inroads among religious voters. But we aren't. In fact, Obama made up more ground among the nonreligious than he did among the religious. For some reason, though, no one seems interested in writing a story about that.
Continues Below
Continued From Above
Comments
I know we all need stories, and liberals are hungry for evidence that we're making inroads among religious voters. But we aren't.
And that's just fine with me. It's one thing if we appeal to voters based on their economic interests, their interest in their health well-being, their interest in clean air & clean water, & their interest in their children's education -- basically, an interest in a functioning government that makes people's lives better -- but I think it's ridiculous to do the whole "we love Jesus, too" thing. It's disingenuous & undignified. Count me among those who think that religious voters need to make inroads with liberals.
If this refers to people who count abortion and gays getting marriage as the values important to them, then I could personally care less about changing their minds. These people are by definition closed minded. Yeah, this sounds like an ignorant generalization, but these people won't change unless someone bombs the shit out of our country and they realize what is important to the well-being of our nation.
Submitted by professordarkheart (not verified) on Sun Nov. 9, 2008 9:45 AM PST.
Obama made up more ground among the nonreligious than he did among the religious. For some reason, though, no one seems interested in writing a story about that.
Well, of course they don't. Don't you know that the votes of evangelicals, like those of white working-class men, count more?
Submitted by eb (not verified) on Sun Nov. 9, 2008 9:49 AM PST.
I'm sure some liberals are hoping to make inroads among religious voters, but smart liberal are hoping to convince the religious of the fundamental error of their ways. If you believe rational empiricism - secularism - is superior to irrational belief systems - religion - then perhaps you should try to stand up for your belief, instead of pretending to respect what you know to be blatant and harmful falsehoods just to gain the affection of those who fall for them.
Why do you want to make Amy Sullivan cry? Why Kevin!?! Don't you know we can't win elections without the approval of James Dobson? YOU ATHEISTIC MONSTER! TRUE DEMOCRATS VOTE HOW PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THAT GEORGE BUSH WAS APPOINTED BY GOD TELL THEM TO VOTE! We must go to these people and tell them that we have converted to the one true faith of Televangelism. We must go to them and acknowledge the Divine role of President Bush. We must go to them, atoning for our not being Republicans. Otherwise, we will never take back the White House in 2008!
Anyone who has acquaintances who are evangelicals knows they're pretty adamant about their core issues. I never expected Obama to make many inroads into the evangelical vote...except with those who are suffering from the economic crisis. Perhaps it would be more informative to break the evangelical vote down according to income levels. I suspect those who could afford to vote according to their religious beliefs alone did so, while those experiencing financial difficulties of all sorts voted on the economy.
What I haven't seen anywhere: how Obama did with military voters.
I haven't heard a peep about it from the lefty or righty blogs, which makes me wonder if that information can even be gathered. But there had to be exit polling or something, and comparisons with 2004 seem to be happening with every other demographic. Any help?
Since 2004 we have seen the emergence of a subset of evangelicals who consider "creation care" (i.e. environmental stewardship) to be important, we should have expected several points of movement based on that alone. The fact that we saw as little movement as we did I think means that the religious divide is as strong as ever. Although perhaps the data is skewed by a racial signal?
What about human waste
Submitted by jewelry stores (not verified) on Sat Aug. 15, 2009 2:09 AM PDT.
What about human waste recycling as fertilizer. We are wasting a lot of waste right now. In fact, we're wasting a lot of energy to waste that waste.
