Word: gop
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pentecostal Christian, as his running mate was supposed to help strengthen his appeal to religious voters. Republican strategists knew that undecided religious voters broke heavily for George W. Bush in the last weeks of the 2004 campaign, and they hoped Palin's candidacy would sway those voters to the GOP again this year. Instead, those late deciders - including white Evangelicals - appear to have split between Obama and McCain...
...least-religious Americans continue to reject the GOP in large numbers. Voters who say they visit houses of worship just a few times a year or not at all made up 44% of the electorate in this election. They gave Obama 59% and 68% of their votes, respectively; both totals represent double-digit increases from four years...
...those target states, Obama both outperformed his national average among white Evangelicals and chipped away at the GOP's 2004 advantage. In Michigan, where the state party began building relationships with social conservatives in the western half of the state during the 2006 election cycle, Obama won 33% of the white Evangelical vote, a 12-point shift from 2004. The campaign's Evangelical outreach coordinator spent the last weeks of the race in tightly-contested Indiana, with impressive results - 30% of the state's white Evangelicals voted for Obama (a 14-point gain), and the Democrat split the Catholic vote...
...intervention. Yet they were no more likely to vote for Obama than older Evangelicals. It's possible that social issues are still a stumbling block. Younger Evangelicals are even more opposed to abortion than their parents. But it's also likely that the cultural identification between Evangelicals and the GOP is so strong that Democrats will need to invest more time to court them and ask for their votes before a shift can take place...
Finally, there are unquestionably theological and racial reasons for the continued alignment of many white Evangelicals with the GOP. "There is a different flavor of Evangelicalism in the South," says political scientist John Green, an expert on religious polling. Obama's gains among Catholics were driven by Latino and white working-class Catholics for whom the economy trumped all other issues. But for lower-income Evangelicals in Southern states, that wasn't enough. Even in states that Obama carried, like Virginia and North Carolina, his percentage of the white Evangelical vote was much lower than in the Rust Belt...