home

Values Voters and Vanderslice: The Big Lie

By Big Tent Democrat, Section Elections 2006
Posted on Wed Dec 27, 2006 at 03:11:14 PM EST
Tags: (all tags)
Share This: Digg! StumbleUpon del.icio.us reddit reddit

Again we are regaled with stories about "Values Voters" and how to get them. Self proclaimed Dem values voters guru Mara Vanderslice has a good publicist and was able to have this story placed in the NYTimes:

Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice . . . with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Exit polls show that Ms. Vanderslice’s candidates did 10 percentage points or so better than Democrats nationally among those voters, who make up about a third of the electorate.

Sounds impressive right? It is a load of crap. I'll explain on the flip.

So Ms. Vanderslice's candidates did 10% better than Dems nationally did they? So what does that mean in round numbers. It means that they won about 38% of the white evangelical vote, as Dems nationally did about 28% with white evangelicals. Nationally Dems won 38% of folks who attend church more than once a week and 46% of those who attend at least once a week. Nationally, Dems captured 50% of white Catholic voters. It is hard to er, slice and dice what Vanderslice is supposed to have done. But I will look at one race in Ohio involving a so called Vanderslice candidate - Sherrod Brown, and see if Vanderslice actually did something worthy of an article. Here is Brown's performance in the same segments:

VOTE BY RELIGION TOTAL DeWine Brown
Protestant (59%)48% 52%
Catholic (25%) 46% 54%
Jewish (3%) 22% 78%
Other (4%) 20% 80%
None (9%) 18% 82%

VOTE BY RELIGION AMONG WHITES
TOTAL DeWine Brown
White Protestants (48%) 54% 46%
White Catholics (22%) 47% 53%
White Jewish Voters (3%) 22% 78%
Whites - Other (3%) 27% 73%
White - No Religion (7%) 19% 81%
Non-White Voters (17%) 23% 77%

VOTE BY CHURCH ATTENDANCE
TOTAL DeWine Brown
More Than Weekly (16%) 62% 38Weekly (30) 52% 48