Are Christian voters shifting in the U.S.?

When I was in the U.S. in 2008, there was considerable talk about whether the 40-year tendency for Christians to vote Republican in a significant majority was shifting. Barack Obama's campaign had put particular energy into reaching out to faith communities, and there was a sense that younger Christians were less motivated by the traditional 'hot-button' issues of evangelical Christians such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

Evidence is starting to come in that such a shift is taking place. This story reports on the recent findings of the Faith in Public Life group:

The Democratic Party’s outreach to young people and to people of faith seems to be paying off.

A new survey on faith and American politics shows Democratic nominee Barack Obama making inroads among some believers and moving ahead of Republican John McCain among Roman Catholics, largely because of young Catholics’ support.

In the biggest shift over the past four years, Senator Obama now wins the backing of 60 percent of voters who attend religious services once or twice a month, a jump from the 49 percent the Democratic nominee won in 2004.

Senator McCain holds the advantage only among the highly religious who attend once or more a week. Moreover, more Americans say Obama is more friendly to religion than is McCain (49 to 46 percent), an image booster for a party long seen as not particularly faith-friendly.

The survey titled “The Young and the Faithful” was released Wednesday by Faith in Public Life and was conducted by Public Religion Research (PRR). It involved interviews with a representative sample of 2,000 Americans and an oversample of 1,250 young people ages 18 to 34.

As the first close look at the political views of young people during the 2008 campaign, the survey confirms their focus on a broader agenda and reveals a generation gap on several issues.

“Younger Americans, including young Americans of faith, are not the culture-war generation,” says Robert Jones, president of PRR. “There is a kind of cosmopolitan worldview.”

For instance, young adults are more open to religious diversity and cooperation, they are less likely to say that one has to believe in God to be moral, and they believe good diplomacy rather than military strength is the best way to promote peace, says Dr. Jones.

The generation gap is striking in several areas. Young voters are much more inclined to support a larger government that provides more services (57 percent versus 45 percent of the overall population). That’s true within every faith tradition, but young Catholics stand out as the most pro-government constituency of all (67 percent favor more government services).

Young adults support government involvement most in regard to helping the poor and the environment. But Catholics and Evangelicals also favor a government role in “protecting morality.”

At the same time, young adults show greater support for keeping abortion legal than do Americans overall (58 to 50 percent). Catholics and white Evangelicals differ here, however, with 60 percent of young Catholics backing legal abortion and 67 percent of Evangelicals opposed. Yet two-thirds of young Evangelicals say they’d consider voting for a candidate who disagrees with them on abortion.

On the hot-button issue of same-sex marriage, the generation gap is great and growing. Forty-six percent of young people support the right of gays to marry, and an additional 22 percent back civil unions. Among the overall population the figures are 29 and 28 percent, respectively. Younger white Evangelicals are 2.5 times more likely to support same-sex marriage than are white evanglicals as a whole.

Overall, Americans young and old ranked abortion and same-sex marriage at the bottom of their list of issues most important to their vote, with the economy, energy, and healthcare at the top.

Given these perspectives, there is perhaps little surprise that Obama has a 24-percentage-point advantage among young adults, leading McCain by 59 to 35 percent. Among first-time voters, he holds a commanding lead of 71 percent to 23 percent.

“Younger believers – including Catholics and white evangelicals – are significantly more supportive of bigger government and expanding diplomatic efforts abroad,” says D. Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston. “It may very well be that in this election, the conventional wisdom about ‘values voters’ – who they are and what they want – gets turned on its head.”

Despite the young Evangelicals’ broader agenda and the fact that only 49 percent call themselves conservative, they remain the one group of young adults not showing strong support for Obama. In fact, McCain leads among young white Evangelicals 65 percent to 29 percent.

'The last trip to send the family pet to the vet?' Indiana and North Carolina Democratic Party primaries

The Democratic Party primaries may appear to continue the status quo in the campaign, with Hilary Clinton winning Indiana as expected, and Barack Obama winning North Carolina as expected. But the magnitude of Obama's win in North Carolina (58-42%) and the narrowness of Hilary Clinton's win in Indiana (52-48%) indicate that the long Democrat contest is all but over for Hilary Clinton.

As one Republican strategist unkindly put it on CNN as the early figures came in, "This is the last trip to send the family pet to the vet."

However you slice and dice the figures, it is now apparent that Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, and that the super delegates will now be close to declaring for Obama, killing off the Clinton's hope of a palace coup at the Denver Convention.

On the popular vote through the primaries overall, and including the disputed Florida primary (although not Michigan, where Obama's name did not appear on the ballot paper), Obama has a 49% to 47% margin over Hilary Clinton.

What it means for the Democrats' chances in November depends on how you read three factors. The first is the extent to which the Clinton campaign's bruising campaign against Obama has damaged him as a Presidential candidate, and whether they will put aside differences and work towards trying to see Obama win in 2008, or sit back and snipe with an eye to the 2012 campaign should John McCain beat Obama.

The second point is that the nature of the contest itself has energised the Democrat base significantly, and this may matter in states that would be otherwise solidly Republican, such as Indiana and North Carolina, as they have now had far more exposure to Barack Obama and his policies than they would have had if the primary contest had been settled earlier.

The last point, and the toughest one, is how to now hold together the very different voting blocs that have emerged. Obama's core bloc of the tertiary educated and African-Americans can carry the Democrat nomination but not the U.S. Presidency. They need to bring in Hilary Clinton's core bloc of older, rural, blue collar and high school educated voters. In particular, the big challenge will be to win over the women of Hilary's generation and older who saw this as the great opportunity of their lifetime to see the first U.S. woman president.

Hilary Clinton's campaign was not saved by the cornpoke politics of the last two weeks, with its mix of veiled threats about Obama, its know-nothing populist policies (nuke Iran, put OPEC before the WTO, the 'gas tax holiday' that couldn't be), and the attempt to transform herself into something less than she actually is (a kind of Bush-lite). If the Clintons can finally drop their swords and think about working with Barack Obama, they would be a great asset. Bill Clinton remain the only really successful Democrat U.S. presidential nominee since 1964, and Hilary Clinton would be a very strong contributor to public policy if Obama won.

One big problem was pinned down in Salon by Thomas Schaller, which is that Hilary Clinton should not have done as badly with African-American voter as she has. She would never have got a majority once it was clear that Barack Obama was a real chance, but figures such as 6% and 8% of the African-American vote in Indiana and North Carolina are appalling for a candidate whose husband had a very strong base of support among African-Americans when he was President.