We have a new post up at Religion Dispatches that attempts to get underneath all the commentary on Sarah Palin by taking a hard look at the data. To read the full analysis, click here.

Sarah Palin’s abrupt decision to resign as Governor has raised a flurry of speculation across the political spectrum about her current political prospects and her viability as a national candidate in 2012.

Few pundits, however, have focused on what polls actually reveal about Palin’s appeal as a national political figure. The numbers paint a grim picture for the once rising star of the GOP.  At home in Alaska, the number of people saying they have a positive view of Palin has fallen precipitously from 89% in May 2008 to just 54% in May 2009 (Hays Research Group). By comparison, in the same May 2009 poll, 76% of Alaskans reported having a positive view of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who recently slammed Palin for deciding to “abandon the state and her constituents”. 

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According to a national post-election survey conducted by Public Religion Research, the voting public was evenly split about whether Sarah Palin shared their values (49% agreeing vs. 45% disagreeing). Despite higher numbers identifying with Palin at the level of values, only 18% of American voters said Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate made them more likely to vote for the Republican ticket. On the other hand, nearly one-quarter (24%) reported that her selection made them LESS likely to support the GOP ticket, and a majority (56%) report her selection made no difference.

PRR President Robert P. Jones interviewed on CBN News

I recently sat down with CBN News to talk about the impact religion had on America’s choice for president. The interview focused especially on Barack Obama’s modest inroads among white evangelicals, and larger shifts among Catholics and monthly church attenders.

View the video from the Christian Broadcasting Network here.

This most recent selection from National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” mentions the work of Public Religion Research, noting the positive shift in the relationship between the Democratic Party and religious voters. The full text is available from NPR’s website here.

Obama Redraws Map of Religious Voters
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Religious language trips off Barack Obama’s tongue as if he were a native of the Bible Belt. From the moment he emerged on the national scene, he has spoken to believers in a language few Democrats have mastered: the language of the Bible and of a personal relationship with God…

Pollster Robert P. Jones of Public Religion Research says that Obama’s appearance at the 2004 convention was a turning point in the relationship between Democrats and believers. Then, a majority of Americans viewed the Democratic Party as hostile to religion. But Jones’ poll this month found a remarkable shift.

“Barack Obama was perceived to be more friendly to religion than John McCain,” he says. “And that is, I think, an indication of the real sea change that’s under way, and the way in which religion is interacting in public life.”

Continue reading the full piece from NPR here.

This piece from National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” talks about the work of Public Religion Research, Robert P. Jones’ new book, Progressive and Religious, and the change in the political landscape from 2004 to 2008. The full text from NPR’s website is available here.

How McCain Shed Pariah Status Among Evangelicals
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

When it comes to evangelicals, John McCain has remade himself in eight short years. The Republican candidate was a pariah to religious conservatives during his run for the White House in 2000. This time around, he’s not exactly a Messiah but he has won over his base…

“I think 2004 really was the high-water mark of the religious right in America,” says Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research and author of Progressive and Religious.

Jones says the culture wars do not excite religious voters the way they used to.

“What we had in 2004 was a very artificial constriction of religion to be about abortion and same-sex marriage,” he says. “We also had in a way we hadn’t seen before an artificial constriction of religion to be about one political party. And it’s not sustainable.”

Jones’ polls show abortion and same-sex marriage don’t even rank in the top five issues for evangelicals, much less other religious voters.

Continue reading the full piece from NPR here.

The Nation is out with story detailing the progressive efforts to build bridges and find common ground with white evangelicals. We have have been working with a number of organizations to work for a broader religious agenda of social justice and the common good. With these efforts, we are finding that there are shared values and common ground in unexpected places.

Peeling away moderate and conservative evangelicals with a message of public service and social justice may prove to be a challenge, even with evangelical discontent with the GOP. But Robert Jones, author of the new book Progressive and Religious, maintains that “the real numbers are yet to be seen…there are still double-digit uncommitted voters. Those folks who aren’t knee-jerk partisan voters will wait it out.” Jones admitted that in 2006 “most of those evangelicals came home to the Republican Party,” but he is not so sure this year. “The story will be where the uncommitted evangelicals break…I think we will see numbers breaking in a way that will surprise people.”

Creating such a surprise has been the goal of Jones and some of the clients of his consulting firm, Public Religion Research, which has worked with new organizations in Washington to promote a broader religious agenda. One of his clients, Faith in Public Life (FPL), a nonprofit incubated at the Center for American Progress after the 2004 election, was at the forefront of promoting a more robust discussion of faith in this year’s presidential campaign. Throughout the season, FPL has advanced the story line that less conservative religious voters are not only keen on having their voices heard in the public square but also on hearing about how presidential candidates’ values guide their policy decisions. FPL organized the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in April, at which Obama and Hillary Clinton were put to the test of establishing their religious credentials, and pressed for the one at Warren’s Saddleback Church.

Another one of Jones’s clients, the centrist think tank Third Way, partnered with prominent evangelicals to produce an October 2007 white paper, “Come Let Us Reason Together,” on how progressives and evangelicals could find common ground on divisive culture-war issues like abortion and gay rights. (Jones was a co-author.) FPL played a key role in promoting its signers, evangelical centrists like David Gushee, president of Evangelicals for Human Rights and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University; Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, who moderated two of the four Faith Caucus panels at the DNC; and Joel Hunter, the Florida mega-church pastor and registered Republican who gave the benediction on the closing day of the DNC. All three have been promoting evangelical interests in non-culture-war issues, with Gushee focused on environmental issues and ending torture, Wallis emphasizing fighting poverty and Hunter addressing environmental issues.

“Come Let Us Reason Together” focuses on an issue that is anathema to the religious right, and may also spoil Democratic chances to peel off moderate evangelicals and Catholics–abortion. The white paper stresses the value of abortion reduction, and while no reproductive rights groups were openly critical of it, none endorsed it. Wallis and Hunter lauded the adoption of the abortion reduction plank in the Democratic platform, hailing language that they said was included after religious leaders’ input. (Reproductive rights advocates also declared victory, claiming the strongest prochoice plank in party history.) In his acceptance speech, Obama tried to straddle the line between his prochoice base and the religious abortion-reduction advocates: “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.”

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You can read the full the article in the Nation here.

Note: Cross-posted at Religion Dispatches.

As I noted in last week’s Dispatches from Inside the Beltway, the official exit polls sponsored by the media have been skewed toward the Republican party in terms of religion.  The exit polls have asked more questions about religion to Republicans in every comparable state so far, and nowhere have they asked Democrats if they were “born again or evangelical.” It is time for the media to jettison this outdated script about religion and fix this bias in the exit polls.

Faith in Public Life has taken the lead in identifying and publicizing this problem, and last week following the Super Tuesday primaries they fielded their own post-election poll in MO and TN–a poll that for the first time identified evangelical voters among both Republicans and Democrats. After the poll results were released yesterday, Katie Barge (Communications Director for Faith in Public Life), Rev. Jim Walls (CEO, Sojourners), and Rev. Joel Hunter (Pastor, Northland Church; former president of the Christian Coalition), and I participated in a press call with over 30 reporters to talk about how this bias distorts our understanding of both politics and religion. You can listen to the call here.

The post-election poll found the following important findings:

• Senator Hillary Clinton’s support from white evangelicals surpassed that of Senator Barack Obama’s (MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%).
• Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the GOP has a lock on white evangelical voters, 1 in 3 evangelicals voted in the Democratic primary, something the official exit polls could not tell us. To put that into perspective, that’s 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in MO and 182,000 in TN (a number greater than, for example, all African American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state).
• Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and tackling HIV/AIDS.

These important numbers are supported by findings from other research I and others have done over the last two years. Here are three lessons the media needs to learn in order to get the religion story right this year:

1. White evangelicals are an important constituency for both parties and are no longer a lock for the GOP.

• Evangelicals are an important part of the Democratic base. In both 2004 and 2006, Democratic candidates actually received slightly more votes from white Evangelicals than from Black Protestants, an important base group for Democrats. In 2004, 14% of John Kerry’s votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 13% from Black Protestants (Green 2004). In 2006, 11.3% of Democratic House Candidate votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 11% from Black Protestants (NEP Exit Poll, 2006).
• Young evangelicals (under 30). Since 2005, affiliation with the GOP has dropped 15 points, from 55% to 40% (Pew 2006).

2. White Evangelicals are not monolithic, even on hot-button social issues.

• The one-fifth, one-third, one-half formula: up to half of evangelicals are in play. In research I co-authored with Rachel Laser, Randy Brinson, and Joe Battaglia at Third Way, we found that evangelicals are actually 1/5 progressive, 1/3 moderate, and 1/2 conservative, a pattern that held up even over hot-button social issues. These evangelical progressives and moderates make up half of evangelicals, 52 million adults.

3. There is an emerging movement among rank and file evangelicals to move beyond the narrow political issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

• The American Values Survey (AVS 2006), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation, found that 8 in 10 evangelicals thought issues like poverty and affordable health care were more important in the country today that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
• The old Religious Right leaders who are clinging to the narrow agenda of abortion and same-sex marriage are increasingly out of touch and no longer calling the shots. AVS also found, for example, that a plurality (44%) of evangelicals said that James Dobson and Pat Robertson did NOT speak for them. Also, tellingly, nearly a quarter of young evangelicals (under 30) said they did not know enough about these leaders to answer the question.

The evidence has been stacking up for some time now, as Rev. Jim Wallis put it on the call yesterday, that “evangelicals are leaving the Religious Right in droves.” While there have been some important media stories that have gotten this admittedly complex story right, the skewed exit polling we have now is sure to fuel biased reporting. If the major media outlets that fund the exit polls want to keep wrapping themelves in self-congratulatory slogans such as “fair and balanced” and “best political team on television,” they need to let go of their old script, dig deeper, and give us the unbiased coverage of religion and politics we deserve.

Note: This originally posted 2/5/08 on Religion Dispatches, a new daily online magazine dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices. I will be writing a regular column, “Dispatches from the Beltway,” there in 2008.
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Old plotlines die hard, especially when they have the seductive clarity of binary divides: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, us vs. them. Nowhere is this tendency truer than in stories about religion. We have witnessed a real sea-change in the relationship between religion and progressive politics since 2004, and some of these shifts have been noted in major news stories, such as the growing coverage of the complexity of the white evangelical community. But too often, the mainstream media is still trying to force the current complexities and realignments into an outdated script.

In my former life as a software designer, we lived by the mantra, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Media storylines about religion and national elections, and thereby public perceptions, are driven by two major factors: exit polls (controlled by the major media outlets) and the selection of sources for stories by reporters. There is mounting evidence that much of the mainstream media is operating with a perversion of this mantra, a kind of “garbage in, gospel out” approach that begins and ends with its own self-verifying, dated stereotypes about religion in American public life.

The heart of the old script was the mythology of the so-called “moral values voters”–voters who were highly religious, Republican, and supposedly cared about prohibiting same-sex marriage and abortion above all else. We now know that despite the hype, the single exit poll question upon which those conclusions were based in 2004 was deeply flawed.

In a New York Times Op-ed four days after the 2004 election, Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News and a dissenting member of the team that drafted the questionnaire, cautioned that the inclusion on the exit poll of “this hot-button catch phrase…created a deep distortion–one that threatens to misinform the political discourse for years to come.” A series of subsequent polls, such as the American Values Survey (AVS), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life in 2006, showed how distorting these assumptions were. AVS found that Americans in fact think mostly about “the honesty and integrity of the candidate” when voting their values. Even among white evangelicals, the group that was supposedly synonymous with “moral values voters,” only 1 in 5 (19 percent) thought primarily about the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage when voting their values.

Since 2004, much of the mainstream media has unfortunately continued to reinforce the assumptions that religion is only relevant to conservatives and Republicans. A recent study by Media Matters for America, “Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media,” documented the continued bias in linking conservative politics and religion. The study found that while media coverage of religion has increased significantly since 2004, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

Despite these well-known problems, in the exit polling in the 2008 primaries so far, the major media news outlets have once again pulled out their dog-eared script on religion and politics as they constructed the exit polls. In Iowa and Michigan, voters weren’t asked about religion at all. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, more questions were asked of Republican voters on faith than Democratic voters. And nowhere have Democrats been asked if they were evangelical or born again, despite the fact that in 2006 white evangelicals made up 11.3 percent of the Democratic house vote nationwide, casting slightly more votes for Democratic candidates for example than black Protestants.

Even noting the source of objections to this practice is a testimony to the new religious landscape. Leah Daughtry, Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee (and herself an ordained Pentecostal minister) recently lamented in a Washington Post Op-ed that the biased exit polls drove media stories that

“often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats.”

Similarly, a group of prominent evangelical leaders also objected to this prejudicial polling, declaring that these surveys

“pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party.”

As these leaders attest, this skewed coverage is damaging both to politics and to religion and diminishes our understanding of American public life. Hopefully the media will update their script with more equitable exit polling and balanced sources heading into Super Tuesday and through the home stretch of the election cycle.