Alex Knapp says there was not:
I think it’s important to point out that there was no surge of evangelical voters for Bush that made the difference in the election. It simply wasn’t there. The gains Bush saw came as a result of terrorism. That’s what the numbers say.
Dorian Warren says there was:
Maybe I'm missing something, but based on my read of the exit polls, the religious right had a significant impact on this election. White evangelicals were 23% of the electorate, an increase of +9 points from 2000! They broke 78% Bush, 21% Kerry. Is a 9 point increase insignificant?
Update: Philip Klinkner thinks the 9 point difference between 2000 and 2004 is due to a difference in wording. Damn, if they're not going to ask the same questions from year to year, how can one expect to track the trends?
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3 comments:
All of the analysis of the votes that I have seen are based on Exit Polls. Since Exit Polls have been shown to be un-trustworthy, why should we believe any conclusions drawn from them?
Actually, the only exit polling that has been shown to be untrustworthy are the early polling results that came out before the day was over. I haven’t seen how well the total exit polling matched up with the national results after all the polls were closed.
But I do think it would be a mistake for anyone to try to draw too much from a single issue among voters. More evangelicals voted, but so did more youths and more liberals.
We at least found that the “born-again Christian” question in our exit poll was worthless; I don’t know how the NEP “evangelical” question was worded, but if it was anything like ours it wasn’t very good.