Add This Group To Obama's Winning Coalition: 'Religiously Unaffiliated'

[HarveyDarkey]

by Liz Halloran
December 09, 2012

The big demographic story out of the 2012 presidential election may have been President Obama's domination of the Hispanic vote, and rightfully so.

But as we close the book on the election, it bears noting that another less obvious bloc of key swing state voters helped the president win a second term.

They're the "nones" — that's the Pew Research Center's shorthand for the growing number of American voters who don't have a specific religious affiliation. Some are agnostic, some atheist, but more than half define themselves as either "religious" or "spiritual but not religious," Pew found in a recent survey.

They are typically younger, more socially liberal than their forebears, vote Democratic, and now make up nearly 20 percent of the country's population. Exit polls suggest that 12 percent of voters on Election Day were counted as "religiously unaffiliated."

"This really is a striking development in American politics," says Gregory Smith of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "There's no question that the religiously unaffiliated are a very important, politically consequential group."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/12/09/166753248/add-this-group-to-obamas-winning-coalition-religiously-unaffiliated

[NMDemDist2]

1. i belong to that group...

well, except for the 'young' part

[longship]

2. Interesting that the Repubs have driven off both the nones and the nuns.

Couldn't help noticing that.

Of course, we nones were pretty much in Obama's camp for some time. But there is still a fairly good sized libertarian faction amongst the nones as well. It would be interesting to find out how they voted.

R&

[Tikki]

3. In ways the t-baggers hold some blame. For many of this 20%, the young ones..

especially find the t-baggers take on Christianity as cruel.
Many young ones would just rather be kind and unaffiliated.



Tikki

[ElboRuum]

4. So long as the Republicans...

...keep injecting appeal to voters based upon such things as "return to traditional values" or the intimation that this is a Christian nation first and foremost, they'll never get an atheists vote (at least one that isn't otherwise conscripted into the Religion of Rand).

The Republicans should be really afraid of this demography shift, because this increase is showing little sign of stopping.

Of course, this doesn't mean all "religiously unaffiliated" means atheist, however, I don't see these people vesting religious ideologies in their voting habits regardless, and Republicans seem convinced that the megachurch crowd is where all the votes are.