Evangelicals and the 2012 Election

Conservative evangelicals did their part in this election and Mitt Romney came close on Election Day because he had huge support from them. The issue is that the electorate is changing and the GOP is going to have to not just reach out to generic “evangelicals.” They are going to have to specifically micro-target Hispanic evangelicals and younger evangelicals.

Here are the numbers: According to a Public Opinion Strategies poll done by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition,78% of evangelicals voted for Romney compared to 21% for Obama. That’s pretty good considering just 73% of evangelicals voted for McCain in 2008. That 78% nearly equaled Bush’s percentage of the evangelical vote in 2004 when he got 79%.

Also, the evangelical vote was 27% of the electorate, the highest it’s ever been for an election.

Other numbers: Catholic voters who regularly attend mass went 67% to 32% for Romney. Romney also won white Catholics by a margin of 59% to 40%. However Obama won Catholics overall because he over performed among Hispanic Catholics.

Ralph Reed says the following:

“It was a very impressive performance in terms of his support among voters of faith. It obviously was not enough, but there's no question that in what was an incumbent retention election, it was always going to be very close, and very tight, that the increased turnout of these voters, and the extent to which they broke more heavily for the republican nominee than they did four years ago gave Mitt Romney a fighting chance."

More info here.