KIM LAWTON: It's been a pretty interesting election. How did religion play into all of this?
ANDREW
KOHUT: (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press)
Well, the religious voting patterns were clear in this election.
Absent a compelling case between Gore and Bush from a voter
point-of-view, or absent big issues or proposals from the
candidates. What the pattern of the vote really reflected
are the ideological and partisan fault lines in the electorate,
among them religion. So, the most religious voters in this
sample interviewed in the exit poll on Tuesday night found
religious people voting at a rate of 62 percent for George
W. Bush. The least religious people, people who never attend
church or religious services voted only 31 percent for Bush.LAWTON: How did you measure the religiosity of the voters?
KOHUT: Well, in terms of frequency of religious attendance and also in terms of the denominations -- the specific denominations of the people that were interviewed by the exit polls.
LAWTON: Prior to this election, we heard a lot about the Catholic vote and that Catholic voters could be one of the most important swing votes. Were they?
KOHUT: They were indeed. The Catholic vote divided just about evenly between Gore and Bush, tipping a little bit toward Al Gore. But going a little bit less Democratic than they did four years ago, as the Catholic vote slowly becomes a little less Democratic and a little more Republican seemingly with each election.
LAWTON:
And that is a trend we've been seeing, isn't it? At one time,
Catholics were considered sort of the stronghold of the Democratic
Party -- that's shifting now?KOHUT: Well, it certainly was and it is shifting. They were part of the old New Deal coalition reflecting the ethnicity of many American Catholics in the '30s and '40s. But as these groups of voters became more assimilated, they have become more mainstream and therefore divide more evenly between the Republican and Democratic parties.
