Halfway There

by digby

Steve Waldman at BeliefNet has published their political survey of what they call the "twelve tribes" of American religious belief. It is fascinating stuff. Quite a bit has changed since 2004, most especially the fact that the so-called values voters are far more interested in their own pocketbooks than in what other people are doing in hospital beds and bedrooms. But that's not all:

The 2008 Twelve Tribes survey, conducted from June-August, also found:

Click here for the McCain-Obama breakdown, the full survey results, the methodology or Steven Waldman's full analysis.


It's all interesting, but the most important finding may end up being that one about the centrist tribes becoming more suspicious of government:

Based on the new Twelve Tribes study, there are three groups that hover in the middle: Whitebread Protestant, Moderate Evangelicals and Convertible Catholics. In some ways, they're ripe targets for the Democrats in 2008: All of them have turned against the Iraq war, all of them care more about the economy than they used to, and two of them (Moderate Evangelicals and Convertible Catholics) have become more pro choice and more pro gay marriage.

However, all three have actually moved to the right on the critical issue of whether to have more government services. That would indicate that economic anxiety has led them to be more suspicious that bigger government would hurt rather than help them. Obama's emphasis on tax cuts and McCain's emphasis on cutting spending both would appeal to these groups.

In the survey, conducted by Prof. John Green of the University of Akron, respondents were asked whether they wanted to have fewer government services "and reduce spending accordingly" or the more services. The percentages saying they wanted fewer services and less spending:



Waldman says the shift from "values" to economics:

...creates huge opportunity for Barack Obama to win over voters who might otherwise find him too liberal on social issues.

But Democrats can easily misread this data. Many of the swing voters care more about the economy but have not moved to the left in terms of what they want done. For instance, 26% of Convertible Catholics wanted fewer government services; now 38% do. The economic message needs therefore to be one about more jobs and lower taxes, not about more government social programs. There's still a lot of residual suspicion about big government liberalism, possibly even more now than four years ago.


I hope nobody listens to him on that or Obama is going to end up being Herbert Hoover instead of Bush.

I actually fault the allegedly liberal side of the Religion Industrial Complex for focusing on abortion and "values" when they should have been working with these people to deprogram them on economic issues. It is not surprising that a large number of Americans are skeptical of government. They have been relentlessly propagandized for years to believe that government is incompetent and then the conservatives took over and proved it. After the last eight years, why would anyone think the government can solve problems? Under Republicans it only creates them.

That's why if Democrats win they have to do double duty to not only govern properly, but be prepared to argue that conservative policies of endless tax cuts under all circumstances, deregulation, laissez faire capitalism and imperial militarism are the problem --- not government itself. If they don't, they will have no room to maneuver through these huge challenges confronting us --- the people have no other vocabulary or frame of reference than conservative propaganda with which to understand the crisis.

It does seem that our long national nightmare of being politically held hostage to far right religious ideology is over and I thank the Deities for that. But progressives haven't even begun to make the explicit argument against the Right's economic policies and that's got to be done if they are to have the support they need to govern successfully.




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