WASHINGTON (ABP) — “Kitchen-table” issues like poverty and greed were more important to voters in this year's midterm elections than issues usually trumpeted by religious groups, according to polls released recently.
Commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, the survey reported that faith groups who told voters to consider kitchen-table issues when voting had a 20 point higher national favorability rating than religious groups that told people to vote for candidates according to views on abortion and same-sex marriage.
Poll organizers agreed the results demonstrate a growing trend among religious groups to rally around issues like peace in Iraq and poverty rather than more polarizing topics like abortion. And the findings could help determine voting priorities for people of faith in 2008.
The post-election poll tallied responses from 16,477 voters nationwide, including 4,186 Catholics, 3,807 “born-again” Christians, and 6,032 frequent church attendees. It was conducted Nov. 7-10 by Zogby International.
Katie Barge, director of communications strategy for Faith in Public Life, said young voters, even those who attend religious services each week, consistently embraced kitchen-table issues over the more traditionally conservative issues.
She said it was a narrowing of the “God gap” in voting patterns — a gap that reached its peak in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections. In those elections, voters who attend religious services regularly — and particularly white evangelical Protestants and white Catholics — voted overwhelmingly for Republican over Democratic candidates.
However, the percentage of such voters who said they voted for Democratic candidates in 2006 increased significantly.
“Overall, it's interesting to note too that abortion really declined as the most important issue among moral voters,” Barge said in a Nov. 15 telephone news conference. “More than twice as many voters named poverty, greed and economic crisis as the biggest moral problems in the Unites States than abortion. When voters hear from groups that are emphasizing these issues, they like what they hear.”
According to the poll, 62 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 said the most important crises in America are economic justice, poverty and greed or materialism.
Not surprisingly, Iraq was a top issue for voters. Barge and her fellow pollsters found that almost 46 percent of voters said the war was the most important issue on the docket. That's up 4 points from 42 percent in 2004.
By comparison, less than 8 percent of voters said abortion was the top moral issue, and roughly 9 percent said same-sex marriage was the top moral issue.
Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners/Call to Renewal, said the results about Iraq show that religious people want to address the issue head-on.
“On Iraq, clearly … many of us are going to call for a national debate,” he said. “We hope the administration participates. Their leadership is important here, but the debate has to occur with or without the current administration.”
Wallis also said the narrowing of the “God gap” occurred because of broader political agendas nationwide. It was a “moral-values election,” he said, adding that “when someone says it wasn't, they're just wrong.”
Corruption, he continued, has become a big issue. Republicans led the way with several recent scandals, he said, which made their base feel betrayed. And since voters are so concerned with economic crisis and poverty, that apparent betrayal has caused them to reconsider where they place their votes.
According to Wallis, now that Democrats have a congressional majority, they will have to prove themselves to religious voters by making policies friendly to blue-collar workers. Religious voters aren't a “cheap date,” Wallis said, and now that they've voted in new leadership, they're going to want results.
“Trust and outreach both count,” Wallis said. “One of the next steps you're going to see religious voters supporting, for example, are the minimum-wage initiatives.”
Many of the voters who switched allegiances this year were religious voters, researchers said. Catholics who voted for Democrats were up by 12 percentage points since 2004. More than 47 percent of Catholics named Iraq as their most important moral issue, up 6 points since 2004.
Experts like Tom Perriello said the data shows not that Catholics are turning Democratic but that they have established themselves as true swing voters.
“This was not a suggestion that the Catholic vote is moving to the center,” the co-founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said. “There's nothing particularly moral about the center. There's a sense that the Catholic vote did shift this year, but that was driven by moral priorities … and the Catholic message.”
Indeed, when Catholics named the most important value guiding their vote, 67 percent said “a commitment to the common good.” Twenty-two percent said “opposing policies such as legal abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem-cell research.”
Perriello said his group, a non-partisan organization that promotes Catholic issues in public policy, got solid results in appealing to mainstream Catholic groups about kitchen-table issues. And he plans to employ the same methods for 2008.
“The 2004 election was dominated by conservative Catholic groups with a very narrow agenda,” Perriello said. This year, he said, “it's about treating Catholic voters as independent. And the response [in the polls] was to the conviction of that message.”
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