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.
