"Pollsters generally agree that the same voters abandoned the president's party in droves during last week's elections (November 2006), with Latinos giving the GOP only 30 percent of their vote as strident House immigration legislation inspired by Republicans and tough-talking campaign ads by conservative candidates roiled the community. "

Here is the breakdown of 2008 vs. 2004 among religious voters according to Pew:

As you can see the right wingers didn't go for Obama... that was the shocker I proposed at the beginning. According to Pew

"To begin with, there was essentially no change in the vote of regular worship-attending white evangelical Protestants, the core of what sometimes is called "the religious right" -- one of the strongest Republican voting groups. . .

"There was, however, some change in the evangelical community, and it occurred mostly among less-observant evangelical Protestants. Among mainline Protestants there was an interesting pattern. In the exit polls, there was essentially no change among white mainline Protestants. But the data presented here suggest that there were some changes within this large religious community. For instance, Obama may have made some gains among regular worship-attending mainline Protestants. And it may very well be that a lot of the efforts to mobilize the religious vote paid off in that particular community. However, these data show essentially no change among the less-observant mainline Protestants, who were evenly divided. This group was where one might have expected bigger Democratic gains." (emphasis mine)

I highlighted that section because while Democrats might have made modest gains there was really only a small gain overall. Kerry lost with 49% of the vote in 2004 and Obama won with 53% of the vote. There isn't a lot of wiggle room here - so even modest gains can be significant and show democrats where they can look to develop further links and relationships.

Clearly that's in the Latino community who, for the second election in a row, has voted for democrats. This may be due to the bungling of immigration reform in 2005-2006 but still fresh in the minds of 2008's Latino community as well as right wing republicans who still want to talk about it. Obama's campaign also had a much more significant faith based outreach than Kerry did in 2004. Probably not as large scale as Bush/Rove did in 2000 and 2004, but it was substantial.

Anna Greenberg did a study with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and the United Nations Foundation where they asked which candidate people thought was more religious. Nearly all democrats including Hillary Clinton were more religious than John McCain - yet McCain actually scored higher. In a match up against Obama it was close and within the margin of error 32/28. She also found interesting

"only 46% of Democrats said that Barack Obama was the more religious candidate. So even among Democrats, the stereotypes about Democrats and religion are pretty strong."

When asked what religion they thought Barack Obama was

• 57% said he was Christian,


• 12% thought he was Muslim, and


• 1% thought he was Jewish (Sure... Obama sounds like a Jewish name... right?)

"Among the people who thought that Barack Obama was a Muslim, there were an equal number of Democrats and Republicans; this was not necessarily a partisan issue."

She goes on to talk about the Jewish vote in Florida citing The Great Schlep not as a movement maker but something that was funny and "very Jewish." Greenberg then mentions that Obama was winning or pulling even with McCain in some of the ares of Florida that were former Republican strong-holds. Where he was having trouble was in the older Jewish areas.

"If you looked at the data that I had, it was really clear that the issue was with older Jews, which was not surprising; all of Obama's issues were with older voters, older white voters. Jews aren't different -- radically different -- in some ways than other voters; they're the same groups."

Going into the convention Obama was polling Jewish voters in the low 60's which is very low for democrats - by the end he won Jewish voters by 74% - and the exit polls actually say 78% which is one point better than Kerry and near what Gore and Clinton were reaching.

Now with Young Evangelicals that's the fun part... Anna Greenberg from Pew did a poll for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Because people were saying that young voters were coming out for Obama she (smartly) over-sampled young evangelicals when looking at the groups of religious voters.

"Most of the national tracking polls had Obama at about 60% among under-30s, and he actually got 66%. So what we did with this poll was [a] multi-mode study. A certain number of interviews came from random digit dial, a certain percentage from the internet -- we didn't do the cell phone for a variety of reasons. We had, I think, the first real sample of young evangelicals and what we found was that, in fact, it was true that younger white evangelicals were more likely to support Obama than older white evangelicals."

Greenberg goes on to make an interesting point that traditionally young people vote more conservatively as they get older. This is because they tend to have children, go to church, pay taxes yada yada... Greenberg remarks that these people already do all of that. They should be conservative ... but they're not and she doesn't have a real idea on if they will develop into republican voters. I have no ideas either - its an interesting point I've never heard anyone discuss before.

All very interesting stuff that I think points to both the success in organization and the success in outreach. If you build it... they will come.... With youth outreach and faith based outreach that rivaled anything seen before the results were favorable.

If democrats want to continue to make inroads into these communities and tighten their grasp I encourage continuous issue based outreach through legislative sessions and constant communication with these groups to better develop loyalty to the party.

Who knows what the next election could bring, but if the groundwork is laid early with these groups, it could equate a much stronger majority.