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Published
By the New York Times on Friday, November 5, 2004
President
Benefits From Efforts to Build a Coalition of Religious Voters
By
LAURIE GOODSTEIN and WILLIAM YARDLEY
 WASHINGTON,
November 5 (NY Times) - If a White House photographer with a keen eye
for American religious trends were documenting President Bush's moves
the past four years, here are some snapshots that would show up in a
retrospective album:
The
president framed by a nun and a cardinal on a visit to an urban Roman
Catholic school; the president screening a Holocaust film in the White
House one evening with a small group of Jewish leaders he had invited
over; the president bowing his head before addressing an evangelical
congregation.
For
the past four years, Mr. Bush has been deliberately assembling the
building blocks of a formidable faith coalition. Pastor by pastor,
rabbi by rabbi, and often face to face, Mr. Bush has built
relationships with a diverse range of religious leaders.
The
payoff came on Tuesday. For all the credit claimed by evangelical
Christians, Mr. Bush owes his victory to a formula that includes
conservative Catholics, mainline Protestants, Hispanics, Jews and
Mormons.
The
president's strategists set out to improve his showing among not just
evangelicals, but also Catholics, Jews, Hispanics and
African-Americans by appealing to the social conservatives in each of
those groups who felt alienated and disrespected by a popular culture
that in their minds trivializes religion. In all of those groups, he
won more of them over than he did four years ago, although the
increase among African-Americans was negligible.
The
pivotal group may have been Catholics, who make up 27 percent of
voters. According to surveys of voters conducted by Edison Media
Research and Mitofsky International, the president improved his
showing by five percentage points among Catholics, from 47 percent in
the 2000 election to 52 percent this year. In Ohio, where the Bush
campaign sent thousands of field workers to Catholic churches, the
margin was 55 percent to 43 percent for Senator John Kerry.
"In
both Ohio and Florida, the Catholic vote helped carry the president
across the finish line," said Leonard Leo, a Catholic adviser to
the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Mr.
Kerry, the first Catholic on a major party ticket since 1960, fared
worse among Catholics than Al Gore did in 2000, Mr. Leo pointed out.
"It's a pretty big sea change,'' he said. "In 2004, you have
a Catholic running on a Democratic ticket, and he garners less
Catholic support than the president, who is a Methodist. And this in
the middle of a war where some Catholics are not with the
president."
The
president also did better among Hispanic voters: from 35 percent in
2000 to 44 percent in 2004. There are more Hispanic voters now than
there were four years ago (going from 6 to 8 percent of the
electorate), and many of them are either Catholic or evangelical.
Among Hispanic evangelicals, 60 percent voted for the president; among
Hispanic Catholics it was 39 percent (a lesser share than among
Catholics as a whole).
The
Jewish vote is small - 3 percent of the electorate. But after focusing
attention on Jews in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Missouri and,
when it looked competitive, New Jersey, the president increased his
share of the Jewish vote from 19 percent in 2000 to 25 percent this
year. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, found that more than
two-thirds of Orthodox Jews voted for the president.
"What
this suggests is that the Bush coalition wasn't just
evangelicals," said John C. Green, a professor of political
science and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics
at the University of Akron. "It included a much larger group of
more traditional religious people, many of them outside of the
evangelical tradition. What they have in common is that all of these
groups tend to hold traditional views on sexual behavior."
Voters
who identified themselves as white born-again or evangelical
Christians made up 23 percent of voters this year. Seventy-eight
percent of them voted for the president - clearly an increase over the
2000 election (but it is unclear by how much, since the question used
to identify evangelicals in surveys of voters leaving the polls was
asked differently four years ago, making a direct comparison
impossible). Professor Green said his polling showed an increase in
the evangelical vote for President Bush from 71 percent in 2000 to 76
percent this year.
African-Americans
were the only constituency that did not respond in great numbers to
the Bush campaign's overtures, said Tony Carnes, a sociologist at
Columbia University who polls religious leaders.
He
and several black ministers said in interviews that while Republicans
were making inroads with appeals to biblical teaching on gay marriage
and abortion, it was a hard sell within this traditionally Democratic
voting bloc. "The pew is not yet voting Republican; it's the
church leaders," he said.
Four
years ago, said Mike Hightower, chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign
in six northeast Florida counties, some religious conservatives may
have been wary of Mr. Bush. Some may have been put off by news late in
the 2000 campaign that he had once been arrested for drunken driving.
"In
these four years, they have come to understand that this is a man of
great, deep faith, and on that they all agree," Mr. Hightower
said. "They saw a man who didn't just talk about being a
religious person but lives it out."
He
noted that when Republicans in Jacksonville first viewed a commercial
showing a girl who said the president comforted her after she lost a
parent on Sept. 11, "You will not believe the men and women who
wept in my office. That to me is one of the high moments of the
campaign."
Outside
the sprawling, multiblock downtown complex that is the First Baptist
Church of Jacksonville, a two-word chorus emerged from people on their
way to the 6:30 worship service on Wednesday evening.
"Moral
values."
Terry
Lee, 52, an insurance salesman, said it. So did Reecia Harrell, a
"50-something" kindergarten teacher. Same for Laura Hurse, a
20-year-old nursing student.
All
white, all Republican, all Bush supporters, each offered the answer
immediately when asked what had driven their vote for the president.
And each cited the president's positions on a trinity of social issues
- abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research.
But
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, warned against
placing too much emphasis on "values voters.''
He
noted that the percentages of voters who said they attended church
once a week or opposed abortion were no greater than four years ago.
In addition, a surprising 60 percent of voters said they favored some
kind of legal recognition for same-sex couples, with 25 percent
favoring marriage rights, and 35 percent favoring civil unions.
Thirty-seven percent told pollsters that same-sex couples should not
be granted any form of legal recognition.
Mr.
Kohut also questioned whether the anti-gay-marriage initiatives that
were on the ballot in 11 states helped galvanize conservative
religious voters to vote for the president. After all, he said, Mr.
Kerry won both Michigan and Oregon, two swing states where gay
marriage propositions were on the ballot.
"After
reading the newspapers this morning, we're getting a little carried
away with the cultural and religious interpretation of this
election," Mr. Kohut said. "It was a vote to some extent on
values, but it was also a vote on John Kerry and how the American
public felt about the way President Bush handled the war on
terrorism."
Further,
the religious alignment could splinter over particular policy issues,
however. On abortion and stem cell research, evangelicals and
traditionalist Catholics are opposed, while Orthodox Jews are not.
"There are differences,'' said Nathan Diament, director of public
policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. "It is not
just that we are evangelicals who read our Bible right to left. But
what is in common is an appreciation for the role that religious faith
plays in a person's life and in the life of a community.''
Marjorie
Connelly contributed reporting for this article.
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