In recent years, Americans have been battered by Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the corporate excesses of Enron, Disney, and WorldCom.
Now, as the results of the 2004 Presidential election demonstrated, voters are outraged, and values are making a comeback.
In a poll taken on the day after the election, The Barna Research Group found that born-again Christians supported President George W. Bush by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin. In contrast, “non-born-again” voters supported Senator John Kerry by an almost identical 59 percent to 39 percent division. The difference was the rate of turnout for each segment.
Although the born-again Christians constitute just 38 percent of the national population, they represented 53 percent of the votes cast in the election. Barna’s researchers concluded that if the born-again public had shown up proportional to its population size – that is, if they represented only 38 percent of those who voted — Kerry, not Bush, would have won the election by three percentage points.
In particular, evangelicals made an impact that was out of proportion to their numbers. This is the segment of the “born-again” population that takes Biblical principles most seriously. They comprise a mere 7 percent of the voting-aged population. But so many of them flocked to the polls that they accounted for 11 percent of the votes in the national election. According to Barna Research,1 85 percent of those votes were cast for Bush. Meanwhile, non-evangelical born-again Christians, whose votes equaled 42 percent of the total, chose Bush by a smaller margin: 56 percent to 44 percent.
And, as we forecasted nearly a year ago, this made all the difference in crucial U.S. Senate races in Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and South Dakota. In Colorado, the Democrat winner campaigned as a moderate and did his best to distance himself from Kerry. The one new Democrat in the Senate who has genuine liberal credentials comes from the heavily Democrat state of Illinois, where the Republican primary winner dropped out because of a sex scandal. That leaves Bush with a true “working Senate majority,” which he lacked throughout his first term.
More...
