Evangelicals and the 2008 Election

This election gave rise to another (imagined) social category called Obamagelicals. We were told that, because he labored so hard to woo them, because of the ineptitude of the Bush Administration, and because of the desire to put partisan politics aside, born-again Protestants would abandon the Republican Party in droves and put Obama T-shirts on the torsos and Biden signs on their lawns. We were told that there was a new class of evangelical; a class with advanced college degrees who didn't believe in banned books and who supported affirmative action because of their commitment to social justice.

We were told wrong. Or at least none of these claims were substantiated on election day. John McCain took home 74% of the evangelical vote, while only receiving 46% of the national electorate. The Wall Street Journal ran an article in which this statistic (74%) was compared with the 2004 rate (78%) as though it indicated a significant slip in the religious base of the Republican Party.

Actually, what they ought to ask is why was it not more? The Republican Party had behind it one of the most unpopular administrations in American history and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (never mind that it was actually the Democrats' fault; as Thomas Sowell pointed out, the public didn't appear to care about the truth.) Wedge issues (like abortion and gay marriage) were not at center-stage, as they were in 2004, and anyone who brought them up was bound to look out-of-touch.

Furthermore, these statistics can also be compared with how Bush did against Gore in 2000. (He received 68% of the evangelical vote in that year.) If this is taken into account, John McCain has done better with evangelicals against Democrats on the national level than has George W. Bush; and McCain isn't even an evangelical. McCain also scored signficantly better with the evangelical block than George H. W. Bush or Bob Dole did in 1992 and 1996, respectively.

The point is that the evangelical vote appears to be abandoning the Republican Party by every measure except one: the facts.