Much of the liberal mainstream media regards evangelicals as a strange species that is internally homogenous, unique from other types of Americans, and intensely tribal. But poll data tell a different story: Religious belief and moral values matter to many Republican voters, including evangelicals, but there is not much of an “evangelical vote” in any meaningful sense.
Case in point is South Carolina’s Republican primary on Saturday. Most voters will be evangelical Christians, but at least 70 percent of them will vote for a Mormon or a Catholic.
This puts the lie to the liberal mainstream myth that evangelicals act as a bloc. The Washington Post’s Michael Weisskopf famously wrote of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, “Their followers are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” This notion persists in newsrooms today, leaving journalists scratching their heads about a “splintered” evangelical vote.
Michael Barone: GOP hopefuls forget Boy Scout motto: ‘Be prepared’
Wary Romney slams Gingrich in South Carolina
Romney’s taxes, speaking fees become SC liability
McClatchy Newspapers, for instance, reported that evangelicals “cannot decide who they want instead” of Mitt Romney. The reporter wasn’t saying that droves of evangelicals were undecided, he was just noting that some want Gingrich, some want Santorum and others want someone else. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins has endorsed Santorum, as have fellow evangelical leaders Richard Land and James Dobson. A Texas gathering of evangelical leaders voted over the weekend to back Santorum. Yet every poll shows evangelicals starkly divided, with less than 20 percent supporting Santorum. Turns out that evangelicals might not be so easily led after all.
South Carolina poll numbers also undermine the elites’ view of Southern white evangelicals as tribalistic and intolerant. The two Protestants in the race, Rick Perry and Ron Paul, combine for only 20 percent of the evangelical vote in two recent South Carolina soundings, while the two Catholics (Santorum and Gingrich) add up to 45 percent. Seems like it doesn’t matter much politically exactly where you worship on Sunday mornings, and the evangelicals are leaving it up to the secular Left to fret about undue influence from Rome.
Few ideas excite a liberal reporter more than probing anti-Mormon bias among the Religious Right, but this, too, is way overblown. Most Christians do not consider Mormons to be Christian, and so the New York Times posited this week that disagreements over the Trinity “may be an inescapable issue in many voters’ minds.” The Times cast this as “evangelical unease with Romney,” but the paper never made the case that evangelicals’ theological objections to Mormonism would broadly keep them from voting for Romney.
Romney is winning among evangelicals in South Carolina in the latest Rasmussen poll. Romney, in that survey, leads among all three subdivisions of Christians: “evangelicals,” “Catholics” and “Protestants.” Romney does do worse among evangelicals than among other voters, but only by modest margins: A Public Policy Polling survey puts his support by evangelicals at 27 percent and at 31 percent with everyone else.
While there are certainly evangelical conservatives who rule out Romney because of his religion, there seem to be more liberals using that particular litmus test. A Gallup poll last year found 20 percent of Republicans saying they would not back their own party’s nominee if he or she were a “generally well-qualified person for President who happened to be a Mormon,” but 27 percent of Democrats saying the same. Perhaps next week the Times will explore the theological differences behind liberal unease with Romney.
Other voter attributes, besides religion, tell you much more about the willingness to back Romney. In a Rasmussen survey, the former Massachusetts governor polls at 35 percent of likely voters in South Carolina, but among the elderly (65-plus) Romney gains 10 points, among “very conservative voters” he loses 9 points, among people earning less than $40,000 per year he loses about 8 points, and most strikingly, those with children at home are only 20 percent likely to vote for him — half as likely as those without children at home.
So, compared with the rest of the population, evangelical voters are not bloc voters, and they’re not anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon, or pro-evangelical. They are more conservative, more pro-life, more likely to be married and more Republican. These are the real cultural dividing lines, and they explain the GOP electorate much better than the Times’ theological discourses.
Santorum and Gingrich have pro-life bona fides (although Gingrich has flip-flopped on stem cells), and so they do well among social conservatives, and thus among evangelicals. Romney was a pro-choicer who now swears to be pro-life, and so he is acceptable to many evangelicals. Ron Paul is too libertarian and dovish for many conservatives, and he lags among evangelicals. Perry is seen widely as a political flop, and he can’t register double digits among evangelicals.
In other words, evangelicals vote almost exactly like other conservative voters.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.
