Guest Blogger

R Gustav Niebuhr

Associate Professor in Religion & the Media at Syracuse University

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R Gustav Niebuhr is Associate Professor in Religion & the Media at Syracuse University in New York. With over a 20-year career in journalism, most recently at the New York Times and, prior to that, at the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Niebuhr has established a reputation as a leading writer about American religion.

With only a week left to go in a very long presidential campaign, pollsters are working intensely to gain a clear sense of voters’ moods. With something like 200 million Americans aged 18 and older scattered among 50 states, no shortage of ways exist for professional politcal surveyors to take apart and examine the electorate.

Unsurprisingly–in a population that values religious identity–one way is to study how people affiliated with a particular religious group vote.

The results can affect the electoral map, a crucial consideration given that the U.S. Constitution ensures that presidents are elected by a majority of votes assigned to the states. In setting up the Electoral College–which these days assigns 55 votes to California and eight to South Carolina, for example–the nation’s Founders ensured that no American president would be directly elected by a simple popular majority. The race between major party candidates is to see who can get a minimum of 270 electoral votes.

How does religion play into this? Well, the members of some faith groups tend to be more closely identified with a particular party than those in others.

Take the Mormons, for example. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to vote Republican in a greater proportion than almost any other major religious body. And that matters in states where there are high concentrations of the church’s members–in Utah, home to the church’s headquarters (5 electoral votes), Idaho (4 electoral votes) and Nevada (another 5). Of those three, only one–Nevada–has lately been identified as a “battleground state,” for grabs between the campaigns of Senator Barack Obama, the Democrat, and Senator John McCain, the Republican. Nevada’s status as a poltical “toss-up” has much to do with a recent and ongoing influx of Latinos, a largely Roman Catholic group who tend toward the Democrats.

If Mormons have a counterpart in party loyalty, it may be among African-American Protestants, who in a higher proportion than any other religious group, trend Democratic. Their numbers in certain big metropolitan areas–southeastern Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, southeastern Michigan and the swath of Maryland that connects Baltimore with Washington’s northern suburbs, to name a few–gives Democratic politicians a solid leg up in any contest.

But the religious/political landscape is hardly as static as that might make it appear. If anything, some major changes have taken place in recent years that have deeply affected politics in the United States. But that will be the subject of my next post.