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Alabama
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Commentary
Democrat
Black Protestants won the race for Obama. It’s noteworthy that on the
scale of attendance, Obama won among the groups of most frequent attenders,
Clinton among the least. Of the eight percent of Alabamians who said they
never attended church, fully 62 percent voted for Clinton. That’s as opposed
to the more-than-weekly attenders, 61 percent of whom went for Obama. It is
not amiss to suppose that the black churches were engines of mobilization
for Obama—and that those who were not in the pews, didn’t get the cues. On
the other hand, of the eight percent of Alabamians who admitted to having no
religion, 59 percent voted for Obama.
Republican
Huckabee won 47 percent of evangelicals, which in a state like Alabama
means there’s no way he loses. More interesting is the fact that McCain came
in second among them with 35 percent—more than twice the percentage Romney
got (16 percent). McCain, in addition, beat out Huckabee among “other
Christians” (as opposed to Protestants or Catholics or Mormons) by the
narrow margin of 43 percent to 39 percent. Most of those other Christians
seem to be evangelicals who don’t identify as Protestants—most likely
members of non-denominational charismatic churches. They don’t have any
problem, evidently, with McCain. In the attendance sweepstakes, Huckabee
beat out McCain in only one of the categories—those who go to church more
than once a week. But in Alabama, that’s 43 percent of voters. McCain won
the weeklies, the monthlies, and the few-times-a-years. Fully 49 percent of
voters said that the religious beliefs of the candidate matter “a great
deal” to them. Of those, 61 percent voted for Huckabee, 9 percent for
Romney. Evangelicals made up 77 percent of the vote. This would seem to
provide some basis for ascribing Romney’s problems to anti-Mormonism among
evangelicals. |
