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Commentary
Democrat
In the worship-attending department, Clinton prevailed in just the
category of the “few times a year” folks, by 52 percent to 47 percent. By
religious group, Obama had a major problem with Catholics, losing them by a
margin of 59 percent to 39 percent—and Catholics constituted 42 percent of
the Democratic vote. This Catholic gap was, however, more than offset by
Obama’s success in every other category—62 percent of the Protestants
(including 55 Percent of white Protestants), 61 percent of the Jews, and 67
percent of the “others.” Interestingly, those with no religion divided
pretty evenly, 52 percent to 47 percent for Obama.
The Jewish vote in Connecticut is particularly noteworthy, given the
strong preference of Jews for Clinton in New York, New Jersey, California,
and (earlier) in Florida. Jews in Massachusetts broke for Obama as well,
though much less strongly. Is this a New England thing? Perhaps it is not
out of place to mention that the largest concentration of Jews in
Connecticut live on the north side of West Hartford, in close and pretty
harmonious proximity to the largest concentration of African Americans in
Connecticut, in the north end of Hartford and in Bloomfield. Let us also
bear in mind that nowhere in the country is there a larger concentration of
members of the United Church of Christ, the Mainline Protestant denomination
of which Obama is a member—and whose annual convention he addressed in
Hartford in the summer of 2007, creating as much enthusiasm as
Congregationalists are capable of generating.
Republican
Religion factored relatively little into this race. Huckabee drew a
disproportionate number of Protestants weekly attenders (27 percent), but
only 13 percent of all Protestants. Among the small number of evangelicals
(14 percent), he actually finished a poor third at 23 percent, compared to
38 percent for Romney and 35 percent for McCain. New England evangelicals
are, in the final analysis, New Englanders, and tend resist appeals to vote
along religious lines. Romney never had anything to fear from evangelical
New Englanders. The problem was that there weren’t very many of them. Only
four percent of Catholics voted for Huckabee—three percentage points less
his overall proportion of the vote. |