A Hidden Swing Vote: Evangelicals

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September 4, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Hidden Swing Vote: Evangelicals
By MICHAEL HOUT and ANDREW M. GREELEY

The press has made a big issue of how President Bush and Senator John Kerry are both trying to woo voters from groups that usually support the other side, be they military veterans, Hispanics or Jews. Yet one group that receives almost no attention is Christian evangelicals. We are repeatedly told they form the president's unshakeable electoral base. But in truth, this claim is vastly simplistic: the fashionable image of masses of white evangelical voters, stirred up by the tricks of Karl Rove and led by Bible-thumping clergymen, marching in lock step to deny rights to women and to gays, is hardly born out by the data. Rather, the real Republican base is the same as it was before Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" appealed to religious Protestants in 1968: the wealthy and the powerful.

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In the last two presidential elections, about 62 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican - or about 7.5 percent more than among other American Protestants. A majority, clearly, but nowhere near unanimity. And in terms of the electorate as a whole, it's hardly fair to say evangelicals are a dominant political force. If we measure their overall political influence as that 7.5 percent differential multiplied by their share of the electorate - they make up about 21 percent of voters- it comes to about 1.6 percentage points. Yes, as the 2000 election showed, even an edge that small can be decisive in a close race. But it hardly amounts to an overwhelming base. Moreover, those 1.6 percentage points are spread across all regions, not concentrated in the South, where the evangelicals supposedly contribute to the Republicans' red state advantage.

Clearly, claims that evangelicals have hijacked the nation's politics are greatly exaggerated. In fact, polling data show that President Bush's real base is not religious but economic, the group he jokingly referred to as "the haves and the have mores."

The General Social Survey found that 20 percent of American voters have family incomes of more than $75,000 a year, while twice that many earn $30,000 or less. The high-income group (about the same size as the evangelicals) votes Republican by an 18-point margin, while the low-income group favors Democrats by 24 percentage points. If the Republicans were to lose their 18-point advantage among the affluent, it would cost them about four percentage points nationwide in the election, more than twice the cost if they were to lose their edge among evangelicals.

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