“Evangelicals Haven’t Embraced the Democrats’ Agenda,” crows Naomi Schaefer Riley in today’s Wall Street Journal, gleefully dismissing Barack Obama’s attempts to reach out to Christian voters. “Are religious voters feeling the stirrings of a new, leftward-leaning faith agenda?” she asks rhetorically. “Not really,” she answers, citing two recent polls.
While Riley’s argument doesn’t fall into the category of “damn lies,” her statistics are misleading. If Riley were merely voicing skepticism that a sea change is really under way among the evangelical electorate, she would be justified. But her suggestion that Christian voters are the same voting bloc in 2008 that they were in 2004 is just flat wrong, and she uses specious analysis to reach that conclusion.
Her lead bit of evidence is a finding from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that evangelicals remain more conservative than Americans generally. There’s no arguing with those statistics: 61 percent of evangelicals believe abortion should be illegal, for example, compared to 43 percent of the population as a whole. But the more relevant question is whether evangelicals are shifting, even of some of these tough social issues. A comparison of today’s polls with polls from 2004 suggests that they are indeed: the number of evangelicals who believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases has dropped eight points. (Interestingly, though, young evangelicals are more rigorously anti-abortion than their grandparents.) Opposition to gay marriage has similarly declined, from 75 percent in 2004 to 69 percent in 2008. (Here, younger evangelicals are driving the trend—30 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds believe gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry, as oppose to 15 percent of those over age fifty-six.)
But the debate about evangelical attitudes on social issues is something of a red herring. It is perfectly conceivable that even evangelicals who remain strongly opposed to abortion and gay marriage might consider voting Democrat because other concerns—the economy, health care, energy prices—are weighing heavily on them this election year. Corwin Smidt, of Calvin College’s Henry Institute and the author of one of the studies Riley cites, explained, “Evangelicals haven’t so much changed their position, but their agenda has broadened.”
There is a growing frustration among evangelicals that they have lost much of their political clout in recent years because they became a single-issue voting bloc. In a January interview, Richard Cizik, the vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, described the alliance with the GOP as an “unholy” one “in which the evangelicals have given everything and gotten nothing in return.” This year, he said in June, “I’m not going to vote for someone just because they’re pro-life. I don’t think evangelicals should either.” He also cautioned the 30 million evangelicals his organization represents, “Do not cast your ballot for someone who supports the [federal] marriage amendment.”
The question is how high evangelicals rank social issues on their lists of voting-booth concerns, not how they feel about those issues in the abstract. Surprisingly, this data is relatively hard to come by. The Pew Forum, which is widely considered the gold standard on religious polling, has not asked that question in its recent surveys. But polls have shown that at times during this election cycle, health care—not abortion—tops the list of evangelical priorities, while the economy, social security reform, and immigration all rank higher than gay marriage.
This does not mean that the 26 percent of Americans who consider themselves evangelical are all in play. Broad partisan realignment does not happen overnight in American politics, and social issues are not the only aspects of the GOP platform that have kept evangelicals loyal for a generation. Evangelicals do, in fact, remain the voting bloc least friendly to the Democrats. Fifty percent identify as Republican as compared to 35 percent of the population as a whole. But that is an 11 percent decrease since 2004. And John McCain has lost eleven points of the advantage George W. Bush had over his John Kerry among evangelicals at this time in the 2004, according to the Smidt’s Henry Institute.
In a country whose political culture is as narrowly divided as ours, these small changes can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of an election, especially in swing states with considerable evangelical populations like Missouri, Florida, and Ohio. We may not be witnessing a sea change, but that doesn’t mean there’s no turning of the tide.
Lester Feder is a freelance reporter based in Washington, D.C., and a research scientist at George Washington University School of Public Health.