Just a little bit – Jody Bottum at FT on right, left, the war and (a bit of) the election:
The middle in American politics, the non-ideological voters, were always changeable. If the war went well, they would support it; if the war went poorly, they would lose patience. But even that is insufficient to explain yesterday’s election results. The fact is that conservatives, too, were changeable on the war, and they varied as the result seemed to prove or disprove the foreign-policy theory under which we went to war.
Only the left wouldn’t change. The war, I believe, has gone better than news reports suggest, but even if the war were working out easily, the people on the far left would oppose it in exactly the same numbers they now do. It isn’t that they reject American foreign policy, although that’s the effect. They reject the notion that this is a foreign-policy question. It’s a culture war, and they are looking to win here the battles in the culture wars they believe they have lost elsewhere.
Perhaps they will, but the imbalance in views of the war means that yesterday’s Democratic victory is much less of a mandate than it appears. The general victory of conservative referendum measures across the country seems to say the opposite: Conservatives are tired of the war, not tired of conservatism. They’ve lost patience with Republican corruption and incompetence, not with the right in general. They’ll live to regret that, I think, particularly if Justice Stevens retires from the Supreme Court next year, as it is rumored he will. But, whatever the Democrats attempt over the next two years, the presidential election of 2008 was not settled yesterday.
Terry Mattingly on the coverage of religion and politics
One of the most important factors in recent years has been the development of a religiosity gap in which the most church-going Americans voted Republican and the least devout voted Democratic. This gap closed a bit yesterday.
People who attended church weekly voted 58 percent to 41 percent for Bush in 2004. This year, they voted 51 percent for Republicans to 48 percentfor Democrats.
This seems to be particularly true in some of the key swing states. For instance, in Ohio the Democratic candidate for Senate, Sherrod Brown, got 44 percent of those attending worship services weekly or more. The Democratic Senate candidate in 2004, Eric Fingerhut, got only 27 percent and John Kerry got 35 percent of them.
It’s unclear whether church-going voters turned to Democrats because they now viewed them as friendlier to faith or whether they were simply motivated by unhappiness with the war in Iraq
Catholics — With all the attention on evangelicals, we shouldn’t lose sight of another significant result: In this election, Democrats won back the Catholic vote. In 2004, President Bush beat John Kerry among Catholics 52 percent-47 percent. The exit polls for the House races show Catholics going 57 percent-42 percent for the Democrats. Democrats gained ground among white Catholics and Hispanics.
In all likelihood this has little to do with social issues but rather illustrates Catholic dissatisfaction with the Iraq war.
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