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Steven Waldman

The most detailed and fascinating explication of Barack Obama’s faith came in a 2004 interview he gave Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani when he was running for U.S. Senate in Illinois. The column she wrote about the interview has been quoted and misquoted many times over, but she’d never before published the full transcript…

Nationally, 25% of white evangelicals voted for Obama. In certain key states, the numbers were higher. He saw a 14% increase in support from white evangelicals in Colorado, 8% in Indiana, 8% in North Carolina and 4% in Ohio. Most important, he won 32% of young evangelicals (up from 16% for McCain). Who are these…

From comments posted in our community, we had the sense that the typical poll question about Obama’s faith — do you think he’s a Muslim — wasn’t actually getting at the way anti-Obama opinion was congealing. We wondered whether the polls saying 11% of people think Obama is a Muslim dramatically understated the problem Obama…

Many religious conservatives simply don’t believe that religious liberals are genuinely, well, religious. The new Beliefnet election survey shows two things: that the religious Obama supporters are just as pious in several key ways. 81% pray DAILY, not exactly the behavior of closet secular humanists. Only 16% percent of them believe the Bible is merely…

It seemed like 2004 was a high water mark for evangelical influence. They loved President Bush and helped sweep him into victory. Well guess what: evangelicals made up an even bigger part of the McCain vote than the Bush vote. Born again Christians or evangelicals made up 36% of Bush vote and, by my count,…

The new Beliefnet survey offers some fascinating insight into how voters are looking at abortion. In the Beliefnet survey, about 20% of overall Obama voters and 35% of the most religious Obama voters (those who attend church weekly or more) were pro-life. If national results track Beliefnet users — we’ll have to wait for some…

Before he deals with the economy, President-Elect Obama will have to deal with a much more politically delicate quesiton: what type of puppy should he get? He promised his girls a puppy if they moved to the White House but at his first post-election press conference, he noted that one of his girls is allergic.…

Beliefnet has just released a fascinating survey of 4,400 of its users.  It’s not a random sample but the size of the group enabled us to do some fascinating slicing and dicing — in particular getting a glimpse at the differences between Obama’s most religious voters and the McCain religious voters. Here are a few…

A debate is raging about whether the financial collapse (beginning with the fall of Lehman brothers) killed McCain’s election chances. Many conservatives are arguing that, given circumstances beyond his control, McCain’s defeat was inevitable. Andrew Sullivan and others have pointed out that McCain’s polls started slipping before that, around the time of the Sarah Palin…

Listening to the coverage one would have the sense that a key part of Obama’s victory was a flood of new young people coming to the polls for the first time. Not so. Percentage of the electorate in 2004 ages 18-29: 17% Percentage in 2008: 18% By contrast, the portion of the electorate comprised of…
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