Note: Cross-posted at Religion Dispatches.

As I noted in last week's Dispatches from Inside the Beltway, the official exit polls sponsored by the media have been skewed toward the Republican party in terms of religion. . The exit polls have asked more questions about religion to Republicans in every comparable state so far, and nowhere have they asked Democrats if they were "born again or evangelical." It is time for the media to jettison this outdated script about religion and fix this bias in the exit polls.

Faith in Public Life has take the lead in identifying and publicizing this problem, and last week following the Super Tuesday primaries they fielded their own post-election poll in MO and TN--a poll that for the first time identified evangelical voters among both Republicans and Democrats. After the poll results were released yesterday, Katie Barge (Communications Director for Faith in Public Life), Rev. Jim Walls (CEO, Sojourners), and Rev. Joel Hunter (Pastor, Northland Church; former president of the Christian Coalition), and I participated in a press call with over 30 reporters to talk about how this bias distorts our understanding of both politics and religion. You can listen to the call here.

The post-election poll found the following important findings:

• Senator Hillary Clinton's support from white evangelicals surpassed that of Senator Barach Obama's (MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%).
• Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the GOP has a lock on white evangelical voters, 1 in 3 evangelicals voted in the Democratic primary, something the official exit polls could not tell us. To put that into perspective, that's 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in MO and 182,000 in TN (a number greater than, for example, all African American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state).
• Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and tackling HIV/AIDS.

These important numbers are supported by findings from other research I and others have done over the last two years. Here are three lessons the media needs to learn in order to get the religion story right this year:

1. White evangelicals are an important constituency for both parties and are no longer a lock for the GOP.

• Evangelicals are an important part of the Democratic base. In both 2004 and 2006, Democratic candidates actually received slightly more votes from white Evangelicals than from Black Protestants, an important base group for Democrats. In 2004, 14% of John Kerry’s votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 13% from Black Protestants (Green 2004). In 2006, 11.3% of Democratic House Candidate votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 11% from Black Protestants (NEP Exit Poll, 2006).
• Young evangelicals (under 30). Since 2005, affiliation with the GOP has dropped 15 points, from 55% to 40% (Pew 2006).

2. White Evangelicals are not monolithic, even on hot-button social issues.

• The one-fifth, one-third, on-half formula: up to half of evangelicals are in play. In research I co-authored with Rachel Laser, Randy Brinson, and Joe Battaglia at Third Way, we found that evangelicals are actually 1/5 progressive, 1/3 moderate, and 1/2 conservative, a patter that held up even over hot-button social issues. These evangelical progressives and moderates make up half of evangelicals, 52 million adults.
  

3. There is an emerging movement among rank and file evangelicals to move beyond the narrow political issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

• The American Values Survey (AVS 2006), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation, found that 8 in 10 evangelicals thought issues like poverty and affordable health care were more important in the country today that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
• The old Religious Right leaders who are clinging to the narrow agenda of abortion and same-sex marriage are increasingly out of touch and no longer calling the shots. AVS also found, for example, that a plurality (44%) of evangelicals said that James Dobson and Pat Robertson did NOT speak for them. Also, tellingly, nearly a quarter of young evangelicals (under 30) said they did not know enough about these leaders to answer the question.

The evidence has been stacking up for some time now, as Rev. Jim Wallis put it on the call yesterday, that "evangelicals are leaving the Religious Right in droves." While there have been some important media stories that have gotten this admittedly complex story right, the skewed exit polling we have now is sure to fuel biased reporting. If the major media outlets that fund the exit polls want to keep wrapping themelves in self-congratulatory slogans such as "fair and balanced" and "best political team on television," they need to let go of their old script, dig deeper, and give us the unbiased coverage of religion and politics we deserve.

Labels: evangelicals, exit polls, primaries

Note: Crossposted at StreetProphets.

Despite a drumbeat of public criticism by Faith in Public Life and others about biased exit polling on religion by the major media networks, the exit polls continue to ask more questions about religion to Republicans than Democrats.

I wrote yesterday in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column in the debut issue of Religion Dispatches about how this bias distorts our understanding of religion among both parties.

Here's the current tally:

• 25 states have had both Republican and Democratic primaries
• 20 of these states had state-wide exit polls
• All of these states asked more questions about religious affiliation to Republicans than Democrats. (Only one of these, AZ, was a Super Tuesday state).

Upshot about the major media exit poll bias:

• They have asked Republicans about religion in every exit poll, but have NOT asked Democrats ANYTHING about religion in 3 states (IA, MI, NV).
• They have NOT asked Democrats ANYWHERE about whether they were "evangelical or born again."

It's time for the media to update their script and give us balanced coverage of the role of religion in both parties.

Labels: evangelicals, exit polls, media, primaries, religion

Note: this entry cross-posted at the Common Good Blog at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

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While Catholic opposition to physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is often mentioned in the same breath as abortion and grounded in an appeal to the sacredness of human life, there is a strong but often-neglected argument against the legalization of PAS that also relies on other key principles of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly its emphasis on social justice and the common good.

The 10th anniversary of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which made Oregon the only state to legalize physician-assisted suicide (PAS), came and went largely without controversy last fall. But embedded in this issue are important lessons about the interrelationship between protecting life and social justice. In an election year, when complex issues are too often reduced to sound bytes, making these connections is an important moral exercise that helps us re-envision how a commitment to the common good might change our politics.

Many think of debates about PAS as just another round of the “pro-life”/“pro-choice” abortion debates. But choices about PAS, if they are to have moral significance, must be un-coerced, free choices. And meaningful choices must be available not just to the privileged few but to everyone. A common good lens highlights the stark inequalities in our society that too often constrain, threaten, or even prohibit meaningful free choices for many vulnerable citizens on this issue.

It is no secret that the health care system in America needs repair if not complete overhaul. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2006 the proportion of Americans without health insurance rose to 15.8 percent, or 47 million people, and a recent report by Families USA found that almost 90 million Americans under age 65 were uninsured for some or all of the 2006-2007 two-year period. Not surprisingly, minority groups bear a disproportionate brunt of this problem – 21 percent of African Americans and 34% percent of Hispanics are uninsured.

In a context of such health care inequalities, legalizing PAS puts the working poor who lack insurance at risk of reaching for PAS under financial duress. Choosing between spending $40-$150 for a lethal prescription versus tens of thousands of dollars for long-term care is hardly an unfettered choice between equal alternatives. In this situation, the coercive power of scarcity pushes the poor toward draconian calculations that those of us with private health insurance do not have to make. A commitment to the common good calls us to see that any policy that hands the poor tough choices that the rest of us can avoid erodes our sense of solidarity, of belonging to one human family.

The poor, minorities, and the disabled clearly see the problem of coercion. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that while the general public is evenly divided, 78 percent of minorities with incomes under $50,000 oppose PAS. Ellie Jenny, a person with disabilities and an activist with the group Not Dead Yet, put it this way: “Choice is OK when you have options, but when you live in poverty with rationed care, you don’t have options.” The American Medical Association and other leading national medical associations also oppose PAS because of concerns about vulnerable populations and undiagnosed depression.

Despite these testimonies, many still think of PAS through the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” frames. But if we expand the frame to include the common good, we will find that there is common ground that protects life and meaningful choice for all. At a minimum, both groups can agree that concerns for the poor and vulnerable demand that universal health care (or at least universal palliative care) ought to be in place before PAS could be legalized. This would not ultimately solve the debate, but if we could see this complexity and make progress here, it would bode well for so many other issues where the old binary divides fail us.

You can read more of this social justice perspective on PAS in my recent book, Liberalism's Troubled Search for Equality: Religion and Cultural Bias in the Oregon Physician-Assisted Suicide Debates (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

Labels: catholics, common good, physician-assisted suicide

Note: This originally posted 2/5/08 on Religion Dispatches, a new daily online magazine dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices. I will be writing a regular column, "Dispatches from the Beltway," there in 2008.
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Old plotlines die hard, especially when they have the seductive clarity of binary divides: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, us vs. them. Nowhere is this tendency truer than in stories about religion. We have witnessed a real sea-change in the relationship between religion and progressive politics since 2004, and some of these shifts have been noted in major news stories, such as the growing coverage of the complexity of the white evangelical community. But too often, the mainstream media is still trying to force the current complexities and realignments into an outdated script.

In my former life as a software designer, we lived by the mantra, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Media storylines about religion and national elections, and thereby public perceptions, are driven by two major factors: exit polls (controlled by the major media outlets) and the selection of sources for stories by reporters. There is mounting evidence that much of the mainstream media is operating with a perversion of this mantra, a kind of “garbage in, gospel out” approach that begins and ends with its own self-verifying, dated stereotypes about religion in American public life.

The heart of the old script was the mythology of the so-called “moral values voters”--voters who were highly religious, Republican, and supposedly cared about prohibiting same-sex marriage and abortion above all else. We now know that despite the hype, the single exit poll question upon which those conclusions were based in 2004 was deeply flawed.

In a New York Times Op-ed four days after the 2004 election, Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News and a dissenting member of the team that drafted the questionnaire, cautioned that the inclusion on the exit poll of “this hot-button catch phrase…created a deep distortion--one that threatens to misinform the political discourse for years to come.” A series of subsequent polls, such as the American Values Survey (AVS), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life in 2006, showed how distorting these assumptions were. AVS found that Americans in fact think mostly about “the honesty and integrity of the candidate” when voting their values. Even among white evangelicals, the group that was supposedly synonymous with “moral values voters,” only 1 in 5 (19 percent) thought primarily about the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage when voting their values.

Since 2004, much of the mainstream media has unfortunately continued to reinforce the assumptions that religion is only relevant to conservatives and Republicans. A recent study by Media Matters for America, "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media," documented the continued bias in linking conservative politics and religion. The study found that while media coverage of religion has increased significantly since 2004, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

Despite these well-known problems, in the exit polling in the 2008 primaries so far, the major media news outlets have once again pulled out their dog-eared script on religion and politics as they constructed the exit polls. In the Iowa and Michigan, Democrats weren’t asked about religion at all. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, more questions were asked of Republican voters on faith than Democratic voters. And nowhere have Democrats been asked if they were evangelical or born again, despite the fact that in 2006 white evangelicals made up 11.3 percent of the Democratic house vote nationwide, casting slightly more votes for Democratic candidates for example than black Protestants.

Even noting the source of objections to this practice is a testimony to the new religious landscape. Leah Daughtry, Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee (and herself an ordained Pentecostal minister) recently lamented in a Washington Post Op-ed that the biased exit polls drove media stories that

“often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats.”

Similarly, a group of prominent evangelical leaders also objected to this prejudicial polling, declaring that these surveys

“pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party.”

As these leaders attest, this skewed coverage is damaging both to politics and to religion and diminishes our understanding of American public life. Hopefully the media will update their script with more equitable exit polling and balanced sources heading into Super Tuesday and through the home stretch of the election cycle.

Labels: dispatches from the beltway, evangelicals, exit polls, media