Will Declining Numbers of White Evangelicals Change the Senate?

http://religiondispatches.org/will-declining-numbers-of-white-evangelicals-change-the-senate/

BY SARAH POSNER OCTOBER 21, 2014

Try to make sense of this puzzle: white evangelicals, as a percentage of the American population, are on the decline, even in the South. Still, though, Republicans appear poised to gain control of the Senate, where several of the key contested races are in Southern states. What gives?

At the Atlantic, pollster Robert Jones points out the decline in white evangelicals in the South. He zeroes in on Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, and North Carolina, where, Jones argues, “polling shows that the Senate race margins are less than five percentage points indicates that 2014 may be the year that the underlying demographic trends finally exert enough force to make themselves felt.”

The New York Times Upshot blog ranks three of those states–Georgia, North Carolina and Arkansas–competitive, giving Democrats an 81% chance of winning the North Carolina seat, Republicans a 61% chance of winning the Georgia seat and a 77% chance of winning the Arkansas seat. Republicans have a better than 90% chance, the Upshot predicts, of winning the Kentucky and Louisiana contests. What’s more, six other Southern states–Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, and West Virginia–are in the likely Republican column, with the Upshot forecasting a 99% chance that the GOP candidate will win. Only one Southern state, the notoriously purplish Virginia, is in the likely Democratic column.

If you look at the data Jones cites, white evangelicals still make up a significant portion of the population in those Southern states, even if their numbers have declined. In North Carolina, for example, they still comprise 30% of the population. And, as this Politico piece about religious right get-out-the-vote efforts makes clear, several powerful organizations, including Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, are pouring millions into turning out white evangelicals at the polls. (The Politico piece, which has has the evergreen feel of a story you’ve read before, maybe four years ago, taps into a familiar theme: Republicans lost the last presidential election cycle; someone like Reed asks what might have happened if there were even greater evangelical turnout at the polls; new tweaks in GOTV strategies are tested in the midterms, with the not-unintended benefit of actually giving evangelical turnout a boost when many other categories of voters stay home for midterm elections.)

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