Religious Intensity and Party Identification

11 December 2009 @ 12:53 pm | 6 comments

Gallup takes another look at how religious intensity correlates with party identification and not much has changed.

Thus, Republicans are in the plurality among highly religious Americans. For each of the other three groups, Democrats are equal with or higher in number than Republicans. The Democratic edge expands as religiosity decreases. Among the not-religious group, Democrats have a 30-point edge over Republicans.

Ethnicity, however, adds a significant wrinkle, where this trend applies the strongest to non-hispanic whites and the least to African-Americans.

The pattern is quite different among whites. Identification with the Republican Party overwhelms identification with the Democratic Party by more than a 2-to-1 margin among highly religious whites, and by a still-substantial margin among those who are religious. Exactly the opposite pattern obtains among whites who are not religious, with a 2-to-1 margin in favor of Democratic versus Republican identification.

Maybe Mormons aren’t the freakishly conservative outliers they sometimes appear to be. Perhaps it’s more of a reflection of their religious activity and demographics.

(Possibly) Related posts:

  1. BYU-Idaho disbands student political party clubs
  2. Shocker: “Mormons Most Conservative Major Religious Group in U.S.”
  3. More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time

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  1. Velska’s avatar

    Velska on 11 December 2009 at 4:51 pm

    Unfortunately, that analysis just seems to confirm the idea that the GOP is the backlash of Angry White Men.

    These tend to be the people, who “cling to guns and religion” — I would bet that gun ownership also is higher among them; this again may have more to do with geography, since the more religious and conservative people tend to live in rural areas. The huge conurbations are less religious and more liberal AFAIK.

    I would speculate that living in rural areas may make you more likely to have a legitimate use for a firearm, too.

  2. David B’s avatar

    David B on 13 December 2009 at 10:30 pm

    This is a surprise? Outliers like me aside, it’s been known for a couple decades (and suspected for a couple decades before that) that the single best predictor of voting preferences we know of is frequency of religious observance.

  3. David H. Sundwall’s avatar

    David H. Sundwall on 15 December 2009 at 12:50 pm

    I don’t think this is a surprise. I said from he outset, not much has changed since they last looked at this question.

    My understanding is that the two best predictors of party ID is church attendance and marriage. By those two factors, most Mormons have no choice but vote Republican! :-)

  4. Frank Staheli’s avatar

    Frank Staheli on 15 December 2009 at 2:04 pm

    Somehow this comment of mine got attached to a different article:

    …

    It’s not fair, I think, to discount atheism as a religion. When it is taken into account, Democrats are VERY religious–even to the point of ensuring that their religion has an advantage over all others. In 1992, James E Faust said that

    There seems to be developing a new civil religion. The civil religion I refer to is a secular religion. It has no moral absolutes. It is nondenominational. It is nontheistic. It is politically focused. It is antagonistic to religion. It rejects the historic religious traditions of America. It feels strange. If this trend continues, nonbelief will be more honored than belief. While all beliefs must be protected, are atheism, agnosticism, cynicism, and moral relativism to be more safeguarded and valued than Christianity, Judaism, and the tenets of Islam, which hold that there is a Supreme Being and that mortals are accountable to him? If so, this would, in my opinion, place America in great moral jeopardy.

    It has only gotten worse in the intervening 17 years.

  5. Dan’s avatar

    Dan on 15 December 2009 at 9:21 pm

    Since we’re speaking in such broad straw-man generalizations, conservatives have gone off the deep end into fanaticism that rivals the Taliban for its insistence on purity of ideology. So there!

  6. Velska’s avatar

    Velska on 19 December 2009 at 3:16 pm

    I have to agree partly with Dan; about straw mans and deep ends. The argumentation is forceful, exaggerating and loud.

    For example, I don’t think it’s right that women have abortions when they think it’s just a little inconvenient to have a child right now. However, I don’t feel like I can vote for a candidate that wants to criminalize them so that it would be practically impossible to get a legal abortion. That would only make worse the abuse of women we still see around us. (Would anybody say that forced prostitution has ended?) That would mean women — those who don’t have the money to go somewhere where somewhat safe abortions are available without too many questions — would have only desperate options.

    I think there are better ways, and forced polarization of the issue serves neither side, actually. The argumentation of the Choice people also sometimes feed the Rush Limbaugh (squirm) types who get grist for their mill.

    But that aside, why does the Church’s official statement say, that the LDS can legitimately find any political party attractive? The Church does NOT endorse political parties. All political opinions belong to private citizens, even if they hold prominent positions in the Church. (The same goes for a lot of stuff, that any number of Stake Presidents and Bishops (not even mentioning High Councilmen) have strong opinions on, but the “Brethren” have not said anything that could be an official statement or doctrine of the Church. People have different opinions, because they have different experiences.)