God Gap
by digby
Before everyone moves on from this election, I think it's important that we all bookmark this post by Kevin Drum and keep it handy. A new zombie meme is emerging and it's going to have to be chased down and killed over and over again:
Why do I keep writing about the exit polls? Because of stories like this from the Washington Post's Alan Cooperman:
Religious liberals contended that a concerted effort by Democrats since 2004 to appeal to people of faith had worked minor wonders, if not electoral miracles, in races across the country.
....Democrats recaptured the Catholic vote they had lost two years ago. They sliced the GOP's advantage among weekly churchgoers to 12 percentage points, down from 18 points in 2004.
Once more with feeling: in the the overall national vote, Democrats picked up 5 percentage points compared to 2004.
Among Catholics they picked up 6 points.
Among weekly churchgoers they picked up 3 points.
Among white evangelicals they picked up 3 points.
There's just no story here unless you look at individual races. Nationally, turnout among religious voters was as high as it was in 2004, and their shift toward Democrats was either the same or a bit less than the overall national shift. I'd love to be able to say that Democrats made some disproportionate inroads in this group, since it's such an important part of the GOP base, but they didn't. People need to quit saying it.
The problem with Cooperman's story is not that it says that evangelicals and catholics may have moved to the Democrats, it's that Amy Sullivan and her friends in the media are going to use Cooperman's incorrect analysis to prove that that the Democrats need to deliver on some menu of social conservatism because of it.
And if it were true that conservative religious voters moved to the Democrats in great numbers, then I'm sure they would be right, which is why I'm not keen on continuing to try to appeal to social conservatives as a voting bloc --- they are way too conservative even for our Big Tent. The real social conservatives understand this:
"Even though a lot of Democratic candidates talked about faith, and even though a lot of them are devout people who hold similar values, they are part of a party that is liberal," said Janice Shaw Crouse, director of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, a conservative Christian think tank. "So the only hope social conservatives really have is the Republican Party."
You can't be all things to all people, people. If the large swathe of religious voters who are incorrectly alleged to have voted Democratic are widely seen by all these chatterers as religious liberals then great. More people concerned with social and economic justice would be a very welcome and logical addition to our coalition. (And even if it isn't true I have no problem if people think it is.) But if this unsubstantiated mass migration to the Democrats is used by Amy Sullivan and the like as a cudgel to force Democratic tolerance for such abominations as creationism or right wing "family values," then I see no margin in allowing the error to go unchallenged.
Let's keep it real and ensure that it is well understood that the religious voters who voted Democratic are not people who expect the party to abandon gay rights or choice because they "delivered" the election. Those people voted in huge numbers, as they always do, for the Republicans.
The data shows that religious voters moved to the Democrats in the same numbers that every other demographic did, (except young voters and hispanics who voted Dem in significantly larger numbers than 2004.) We can draw no lessons on social policy at all from the rather small percentage change among these very religious voters except that they wised up, like a whole bunch of other people. Good for them. Welcome to the circus.
Update: Josh Marshall, also riffing on Kevin's unpacking of the exit polls, has more on this zombie meme and where it came from. Unsurprisingly, it came from a badly written new story.
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