Not that interested in politics myself, but I was curious about the South Carolina primary. You can see the exit polls here; seems like Mike Huckabee won evangelicals while McCain won non-conservatives. Nothing too surprising. As someone who has generally been of the opinion that evangelical prejudice against Mormomism will prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination, I was curious how evangelicalism tracked the primary results by county. I took these data and ran some correlations with the primary results by candidate. What I did was simply calculate the proportion of evangelicals out of the reported church members within each county (evangelicals divided by the unadjusted number). The proportion wasn't as important as the pattern of proportions across the counties to my mind. Since over 90% of the precincts are back, I'll report my results now below the fold (though I'll update later, I doubt it is going to affect the bottom line).
| Correlation between candidate proportion and evangelical proportion by county | ||||
| Huck | McCain | Thomp | Romney | |
| Evanglical proportion | 0.57 | -0.54 | 0.22 | -0.40 |
| Correlation between candidate proportions by county | ||||
| Huck | McCain | Thomp | Romney | |
| Huck | - | -0.56 | 0.00 | -0.78 |
| McCain | - | - | -0.68 | 0.16 |
| Thomp | - | - | - | 0.01 |
| Romney | - | - | - | - |
I am struck by the strong negative correlation between Huckabee support and Romney support. McCain makes sense since many conservative activists dislike him for a variety of reasons, but Romney has become to some extent the "establishment candidate" (e.g., National Review endorsement). Yet it seems that the foot soldiers of the Christian Right are voting their identity as opposed to their issues. Or, perhaps more plausibly the weighting of issues for the foot soldiers was always different from their ostensible leaders.
Note: Here's the data file.
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There seems a strong component of regional affinity to this proportion of the vote.
According to exit polling, Romney won evangelicals in both NH and MI, while losing them in IA and SC. It's hard to tell how much this is a result of different demominations making up "evangelicals" in those states, and how much is cosmopolitan/regional influence. But like most things, I suppose it is a mistake to consider "evangelicals" as a homogenous bloc.
In that vein, I think the county-by-county results may be very relevant, because the states themselves have a lot of urban/rural/regional variation along the economic conservative - social conservative axis.
According to exit polling, Romney won evangelicals in both NH and MI, while losing them in IA and SC. It's hard to tell how much this is a result of different demominations making up "evangelicals" in those states, and how much is cosmopolitan/regional influence. But like most things, I suppose it is a mistake to consider "evangelicals" as a homogenous bloc.
yeah. i'm going to do the same for michigan. but only so much time in a day ;-)
The data file seems to be missing...
If the heritage of evangelical Protestants in an area is of the 'reform' tradition (Calvin), where government and top down structures serve the religion (think, Geneva Switzerland), then Romney, whose Mormonism tends towards a top down structure also, can do well. If the heritage is anabaptist, there is a lot of mistrust of these structures, and Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, will do well. Dutch Reform is quite strong in Michigan partiuclarly in the SW section. New Hampshire's heritage is Congregational, which does have some Reform antecedents. The difference is that in NH the favored government is the "town,' whereas this is less true in Michigan where the state is OK.