Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
With all the talk about the religious right being anti-McCain, Steven Waldman reports that both the number and percentage of evangelical voters was higher for McCain than it was for Bush in 2004.
It seemed like 2004 was a high water mark for evangelical influence. They loved President Bush and helped sweep him into victory.Well guess what: evangelicals made up an even bigger part of the McCain vote than the Bush vote.
Born again Christians or evangelicals made up 36% of Bush vote and, by my count, 38% of the McCain vote.
He says the increase in percentage may be partly due to other groups shifting to the Democrats, but notes that the raw numbers show the same thing:
Some of that results from non-evangelicals - Catholics in particular -- abandoning the Republicans while evangelicals mostly stayed put. But the Republican ticket actually drew two million more evangelicals in raw numbers than George Bush did, presumably because of excitement about Sarah Palin and extreme fear of Barack Obama.Whatever the reason, some four million more evangelicals turned out this time than last, some going to Obama but most to McCain.
That's very interesting. And I agree that Palin had a lot to do with it. I don't think the Palin pick had anything to do with wooing Hillary Clinton supporters, it was all about shoring up his right wing. And it worked in that regard. But it also sent independent and moderate voters fleeing.
I think this was McCain's biggest mistake of the campaign. He decided to follow the Rove strategy and try and turn out the base as much as possible. But in doing so, he abandoned his natural constituency in the middle. That also allowed Obama to occupy the center. Had McCain run more to the middle in the campaign, it might have forced Obama more to the left to contrast himself.
This leaves many questions still open: Polls showed that Sarah Palin cost the ticket votes. Did the increase in evangelical voters she helped trigger make up for that? Since they represent such a key part of the Republican party will they have more clout going forward? Or will they be blamed for the loss and have less power?
This is the key question. There are serious battles going on right now to establish the conventional wisdom coming out of the campaign. The faction that wins that battle will control the GOP.
Politics
Comments
I agree with Ed; McCain confused his base, which has ALWAYS been the middle, with the GOP base. If McCain had stuck to rallying HIS base, things might have turned out differently.
Posted by: Shygetz | November 14, 2008 9:51 AM
Posted by: Herod the Freemason | November 14, 2008 9:59 AM
Herod the Freemason,
Of course it is an open question. Just because they lost doesn't mean that Palin cost them the election. It might mean that--but the question certainly isn't worthy of a "duh." It's not as if McCain was out-polling Obama before the Palin pick. And its not as if McCain ran a suburb campaign apart from the Palin pick.
Posted by: heddle | November 14, 2008 10:05 AM
Given that there was a bigger turnout across the board, can anyone really claim that Sarah Palin was the chief reason for the Republicans "gaining" 2 million evangelical votes? Isn't is likely that with a more traditional VP pick the Republicans would still have gained evangelical votes over 2004 simply due to the larger overall turnout (although maybe not quite so many as due to Palin)?
Palin may have brought more energy to the evangelicals, but I do not agree that she gets full credit for all their additional votes.
Posted by: CS | November 14, 2008 10:07 AM
Everyone seems to be assuming that there was a bigger voter turnout. So far the numbers I've seen is that voter turnout remained the same or was less than 2004. Does anyone have the final numbers yet?
Regardless evangelicals as a voting base has never been that reliable in the past. The quicker the republicans dump them and move on - the quicker the party recovers (although I am not holding my breath).
Posted by: yoshi | November 14, 2008 10:14 AM
I can't help but wonder if the Palin pick wasn't the main cause of the Republican's defeat, but rather one of the symptoms. Just a really extreme and visible symptom. I mean, why take the risk of losing the center vote by pandering to the extreme right, if they weren't aware that they were likely to loose the centrists anyway?
Posted by: Beowulff | November 14, 2008 10:38 AM
@yoshi: Final final numbers aren't in yet, as there are still a lot of in-the-process-of-being-evaluated votes to be tallied. It'll be a few weeks at least before the actual final count is known, as close as it will be. The turnout models you've seen are models, guesses based on known votes both in this election and in others.
I tend to rely on Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com, because his predictions this year turned out to be freakishly accurate. He says:
Posted by: Jeff Hebert | November 14, 2008 11:16 AM
I always saw the Palin pick as making the red states redder but not helping much in states with lower percentages of evangelicals. The NY Times map showing the change in party votes by county only showed redder in the Appalachian region plus Arizona. My take is that Palin shored up those counties but did not help nearly everywhere else.
Posted by: Brent | November 14, 2008 11:48 AM
right now the wingnut base is in high dudgeon and incapable of any cogent thinking (what's new?
some of the leading lights of the intellectual wing of the party such as Ann Coulter maintain that it is Republican voters who flipped for Obama while independents flipped for Caribou Barbie, and are advising a return to basics. This is what did in an original thinker like Barry Goldwater, it looks like the next GOP nominee is going to get blown out similarly
Posted by: rimpal | November 14, 2008 11:58 AM
Combining Jeff Hebert's numbers from Nate Silver ("... somewhere in the 125-130 million range, actually not that much higher than 122 million that turned out in 2004 ...") with Ed Brayton's from Steve Waldman ("...some four million more evangelicals turned out this time than last..."), it would seem that the evangelicals were almost all of the new voters this year.
If so (which I doubt), either all the new Obama registerees stayed home, which is unlikely, or some equivalent bloc (disenchanted secular Republicans?) sat it out on 11/4.
These estimates all assume, of course, that votes were tallied accurately and honestly, which is not a safe assumption in the USA as we know it.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | November 14, 2008 12:06 PM
I agree with CS. I think the evangelical turnout was as much anti-Obama as pro-Palin.
Posted by: Taz | November 14, 2008 12:26 PM
"And I agree that Palin had a lot to do with it." Ed
Or, perhaps they were voting AGAINST something. Can't imagine what that could be...
Posted by: Deepsix | November 14, 2008 2:53 PM
Simple. All of the bullshit about Obama secretly being a Muslim, while laughable to thinkingfolk, actually resonated with people stupid enough to claim the mantle of Evangelical.
What's especially weird is that some of the twits calling Obama out for consorting with a nuttaloon Christian pastor were among those later raking him over the coals for hs alleged Muslimhood. Make up your minds, idiots!
Posted by: Ira Fews | November 14, 2008 7:53 PM
I think it clear that a more stable veep candidate would have boosted McCain's chances. It wouldn't have changed my own vote, but it would certainly have made me more accepting of an Obama defeat on 11/4.
As matters transpired, Palin's evident disqualification for high office, combined with the wildly rabid following of crypto-racists and religionists she inspired (all positively salivating at the prospect of gaining and wielding even more power at the expense of every other American), punctuated by McCain's own questionable health status, and finally capped by a fiscal crisis clearly caused by Republican-sponsored financial de-regulation, led a decisive number of Americans to decide the "lesser of two evils" favored Obama.
Thus history is made.
Dyed-in-the-wool Democrats hope that the Republicans never learn the lesson. Realists prefer that the Democrats, in turn, learn not to repeat the Republicans' mistakes, but should they fail (which is the more likely outcome--these are humans, after all), that the Republicans finally do learn the lesson.
Palin's failin's ain't permanent situations, you betcha.
To the Democrats--and I am one for now--verbum sapienti satis est.
Posted by: Farb | November 14, 2008 8:36 PM
As Mark Twain said, there are three types of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics.
In this case, the figures as they are presented are misleading. I looked up the figures for the total vote in both the 2004 and 2008 elections. Using the figures as given, 36% of Bush's vote were evangelical and 38% of McCain's vote were, I get (rounding to nearest 100,000) -
Bush in 2004
For - 62,000,000 Against 59,000,000
Evangelicals for Bush - 22,300,000 Percent of total vote 18.4%
McCain in 2008
For - 58,200,000 Against 66,600,000
Evangelicals for McCain - 22,000,000 Percent of total vote 17.6%
So we see that the actual number of evangelicals was higher for Bush in 2004 by 300,000, and those evangelicals accounted for a higher percentage of the total vote.
The writer's conclusion is wrong, based on an (likely)incorrect understand of the data he had.
Posted by: Mobius | November 14, 2008 9:16 PM