Responding in comments about God-o-Meter’s recent post on the same high proportion of weekly white church attenders supporting John McCain as backed George W. Bush in 2004, Spirirtual Politics’ Mark Silk links to his own post on the Gallup God gap poll:

But there’s a shift in the swing group of those who say they attend monthly or nearly weekly (19 percent). Where Bush led Kerry among them by 62 percent to 36 percent, Obama has cut the gap down by two-thirds, pulling to within 9 points of McCain, 41-50. That’s where Obama’s religious outreach is making its mark, for a pickup of 5 points in the entire non-Hispanic white electorate.

Good point. But God-o-Meter notes that Obama seriously narrowed the gap among monthly or nearly weekly churchgoers only in the Sept. 1- 3 period, the last days the poll was conducted before release. There was a good deal of fluctuation in the numbers before then, but McCain was leading among this crowd by 56-percent to 34-percent for much of August. That’s roughly the difference between Bush and Kerry.
God-o-Meter is interested to see new Gallup numbers for weekly/monthly churchgoers that take in the Palin effect. If those numbers hold up, then Obama is clearly making progress among churchgoers. But it could be just a blip.

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