I just received from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life an email recommending “our new and improved Religion & Politics ’08.” The site’s worth checking out, especially since the presidential race already is knee-deep in religion. There’s lots of religion-and-politics info here, including religion demographics of 11 key states (such as Iowa and New Hampshire), analysis of the role of religion in past elections, candidate’s views on church-and-state issues, and so on. Among other interesting facts: that evangelical Protestants constitute 27 percent of Iowa voters and 20 percent of New Hampshire voters. I thought the spread between the two states would be bigger. In both states, of course, most evangelicals vote Republican. With evangelicals moving virtually en masse for Mike Huckabee in Iowa, maybe he’ll do better in New Hampshire – assume he wins Iowa – than polls of Republican primary voters in that state now suggest. As the Pew site usefully notes, the evangelical bloc in New Hampshire was “largely responsible for Pat Buchanan’s upset win over Bob Dole in the 1996 Republican primary.”
