Huffington Post is running a story
(HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost /)
about Chuck Norris, where he says that an Obama reelection will lead to 1,000 years of darkness. Typical election-year hyperbole, says I. But then comes this:
“Gena [Norris] then cites the statistic that in 2008 more than 30 million Evangelical Christians stayed home on Voting Day and Obama won.”
Is this either a proven fact or a well-known myth? I don’t remember hearing this before.
In 2008 there were about 231 million people of voting age. About 133 million voted. Wiki claims that 26.3% of the population is Evangelical according to a 2004 survey, so it sounds plausible, given a slightly higher concentration of them in the non-voting population, or even just rounding up to the nearest 10 million.
ETA:
The wiki article goes on to say that in 2012 The Economist claimed “over one-third of Americans, more than 100m, can be considered evangelical”. It undoubtedly rests on which denominations you consider “Evangelical”, and how you count their membership.
If you figure evangelicals to be 25% of the population (all depends on how you define evangelical) and you assume they turned out at the same rate as other groups in 2008, you’d get something like 25 million of 55 million evangelicals staying home. So it’s not a huge distortion; it’s just entirely unremarkable. 40% of all groups stayed home in 2008.
BTW, “Evangelical” != “Fundamentalist”. The former is generally considered a much broader category.
Gorsnak, your answer seems very logical.
The statement in the OP also presupposes that Evangelical Christians vote in a particular way (obviously from context - Republican) - if those 30 million voters voted according to the national average, then the result would not change.
So you need to know the percentage of Evangelical Christians that vote Republican before you can make a blanket statement. The evangelical christian church is still pretty broad, and many in that classification would have strong support for social policies more in line with Democrat ideals.
Then you need to look at the demographics - if those Evangelical Christians are concentrated in already strongly Republican states, then those additional votes actually may not influence the eventual result (the Presidential election is based on an State-based result, I think).
So not quite as simple as some would make out.
Si
Indeed; this is the result of the Electoral College, whereby each state chooses a slate of electors whose votes actually determine the victor.
Each elector can vote any way they choose, with the tacit understanding that if they don’t vote the will of the people (that is, they don’t vote to reflect how the popular vote in their state went) the Electoral College will likely come under enough fire to be thrown out entirely. We’ve done something similar before, when we changed the way Senators are elected.
I had my suspicions about that statement. Once again the teeming millions have come through.
I would have suspicions about most anything from HuffPo. They are only one step removed from the Weekly World News, where dingos are always hatching human babies. Or eating them. I forget.
But in this case, the suspicious statement is something that the HuffPo article quoted factually, because Gena Norris actually said that. They posted the video that you can watch yourself.
I have a hard time imagining that Evangelicals are more excited about Romney than they were about GW anyway (who they considered one of them). If anything I would expect more of them to stay home this time.
Umm, it was McCain in the 2008 election. Evangelicals weren’t excited about him, either.
J.
If you look at this Pew Research study Barack Obama got around 20% of the white weekly service attending evangelicals, as well as 95% of the black protestants, so the 30 million MIA probably wouldn’t have amounted to more than 8 or 10 million net votes. Of course, in the right states, like North Carolina and Ohio it might have made a difference.
Chuck Norris doesn’t check his statistics. He just massacres portions of the population until they are correct.
Yep. And a lot of people consider “Fundie” to be a slur. I’m an atheist, and I cringe a little every time I see that word used here.
On the broadness of “Evangelical” as a term:
Look at the list of denominations which belong to the National Association of Evangelicals:
That “Evangelical” might, in fact, be Presbyterian. The last time I looked, I would hardly consider most Presbys to inhabit the radical fringe.
It seems like you’re addressing a point that no one has tried to make. The OP was about Evangelicals. No one said anything about fringe or radical, nor even implied that.
:smack: Ok I skipped a cycle. But at least McCain wasn’t a [del]cultist[/del] Mormon.
No, but I’m grateful that the point was brought up and subsequently expanded. I daresay, a statistically significant portion of the Board does equate Evangelical with fundamentalist, fringe and radical elements. Perhaps ‘equate’ is too strong a word, but the association is fairly strong.
My ignorance has been fought today, thanks.
Look at the subject line.