Supposedly the Republican base - of which has included Evangelicals since the days Ronald Reagan courted them - was winning the enthusiasm gap. Evangelicals were always said to have magic powers to sway elections. Hell, George Will even predicted that Minnesota would vote Romney because they were gonna come out in droves because of the same sex marriage initiative on the ballot.
So what happened?
[ul]
[li]Obama won the popular vote by 2.5 million votes and is set to assume a solid victory in the Electoral College.[/li][li]The Mormon faith of the Republican candidate never even was an issue.[/li][li]Same sex marriage initiatives - which had never once passed a state vote - passed in three states while another quashed having the state Constitution amended to remove it.[/li][li]Marijuana is legalized in two states.[/li][/ul]
Of course if you look at a Presidential map, you can see that the Bible Belt is still crimson red. But Evangelicals, while always the main force in the South, were counted on in almost every state in the union as a powerful voting block.
Until this year.
What happened? Are evangelicals getting less political? Are there less Evangelicals outside of the Bible Belt? Are the political views of younger Evangelicals considerably different from their parents? A combination of any of the above?
Once we can figure out what happened, we need to surmise how it goes from here:
Is this a trend that will continue to make Evangelicals as a voting block less important in National and state politics and eventually even spread to the Bible Belt? Or will the shock of waking up in a world where gays are allowed to smoke pot, get married and have abortions galvanize them to get even more involved?
I’m wondering if its not so much that, but that more minorities are voting in force. Demographics arw changing, and as more outgroups in the US make efforts to get their voices heard we are seeing this shift happen.
Do we know that they DIDN’T come out and vote? Is there any information that shows low turnout in that group? Maybe they’re just not as powerful a bloc as people thought/think? A 5% (hypothetical number) bloc looks really impressive if only 30% of the population is voting, but if 70% of the population votes, suddenly it’s much less important? Story of the Republican Party’s life lately?
Or yeah, maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Mormon after all. No data.
I heard about a campaign to get folks to write in “Jesus” for president if they were not happy with either candidate (read; did not want to vote for the Mormon).
I wonder how many votes the carpenter from Nazareth ended up getting?
I also think, from my own personal observations, that young evangelicals aren’t as tied to the Republican party or conservatism. Many of them have a real social justice streak to them and aren’t afraid to break from their parents’ politics.
[li]The Mormon faith of the Republican candidate never even was an issue.[/li][/QUOTE]
Not in public, anyway. A religious version of the “Bradley Effect” may have come into play, with Evangelicals finding it difficult to bestir themselves to go to the polls and vote for the follower of the Mormon “cult” (no matter how many of their self-declared leaders declared that that label was no longer operative).
The evangelicals I know still wound up voting for Romney. They cared about his Mormonism until Fox News told them they shouldn’t. I even tried to point out how they were voting for the Mormon candidate, after teaching me all my life that I should vote for the Christian, and that Mormons weren’t Christians.
I get blasted about that, rather than them ever realizing their inconsistency.
This does lead me to an interesting idea, though. All we have to do is get a gay Republican to run for office, and, boom, Evangelicals will accept homosexuality.
And not all Evangelicals, of whichever race or ethnicity, are politically conservative. From Sojourner (Jim Walllis, CEO & Editor, has been on the Daily Show)
And Evangelical is not a synonym for Fundamentalist. Historically, the more conservative Protestants–often belonging to denominations which had been persecuted by various Established Churches–avoided mixing their faith with politics. Here’s a .pdf from the Texas Freedom Network, detailing the history of the Religious Right; the unholy congress between the Texas Republican Party & the Southern Baptist Convention was pivotal.
I’ll be checking back with these sources for analysis of the election. But, for the most religiously conservative members of this movement, both Romney’s LDS membership & Ryan’s Roman Catholicism would have been problematic…
Can some of the people contending that Romney’s religion was indeed an issue provide any evidence of this?
I mean, there is no shortage of evidence that Obama’s *perceived *religion - not even his real faith - was an issue. It polled. It was discussed in the media. It was discussed on these boards.