WASHINGTON (ABP) — In the Jan. 8 New Hampshire primary, each party's newly minted front-runner didn't score as well among voters — religious or otherwise — as they did in the previous week's Iowa caucuses, according to exit-poll data.
Hillary Clinton of New York edged out her Senate colleague, Barack Obama of Illinois, in the Democratic primary just days after suffering a crushing caucus defeat to him. Meanwhile, GOP Iowa winner Mike Huckabee — a former governor, pastor and president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention — came in a distant third in New Hampshire behind Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Exit-polls from Edison Media Research show few consistent patterns among religious voters — the overwhelming majority of whom in New Hampshire are Christians — in either party.
While similar surveys showed Huckabee overwhelmingly won among evangelical Christians in Iowa, the evangelical share of the GOP electorate in New Hampshire is much smaller. But Huckabee's share of the electorate was identical to McCain's — at 28 percent each — even among Granite State Republicans who consider themselves evangelical or “born-again” Christians.
McCain won far larger percentages of all Protestant and Catholic GOP voters than Huckabee. He also beat Huckabee among voters who said the candidate's religious beliefs matter a “great deal.” While McCain got 34 percent of those voters, Huckabee garnered 28 percent.
McCain also won much larger pluralities than Huckabee among GOP voters who said a candidate's religious beliefs matter “somewhat” or “not much.” Romney — a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — won the lion's share of voters who said they didn't care “at all” about a candidate's religion.
The only religious category in which Huckabee won a larger percentage of voters than McCain was among Republicans who said they attend church “more than weekly.” The preacher won 34 percent of those voters, while McCain garnered 24 percent. That group comprised only 9 percent of GOP voters.
McCain won much larger percentages than Huckabee in all other categories of church attendance, including those who worship weekly, monthly, only occasionally, or never. The largest of those categories — those who attend church only a few times annually — comprised 31 percent of GOP primary voters.
McCain was baptized and raised in the Episcopal Church, but for decades he and his family have attended a Southern Baptist church in his home state. In September, he gained some negative publicity for claiming to be a Baptist even though he had not been re-baptized as an adult and therefore not a full member of North Phoenix Baptist Church.
On the Democratic side, meanwhile, both the very faithful and the irreligious were more likely to support Obama than Clinton. Among the 18 percent of New Hampshire Democrats who said they attend church on at least a weekly basis, 37 percent supported the Illinois senator while 32 percent voted for his New York counterpart.
But Clinton won a significantly larger share among New Hampshire Democrats who occasionally attend church. Forty-three percent of those who said they worship somewhere between once a month and a few times a year supported Clinton, compared to 31 percent for Obama.
Obama edged Clinton among non-churchgoing New Hampshire Democrats, with 39 percent to Clinton's 35 percent.
The only theological sub-category in which Obama equaled Clinton was among Granite State Protestants, with each candidate registering 36 percent of that vote. However, Clinton won handily among New Hampshire's large Catholic community, with 44 percent to Obama's 27 percent.
Obama beat Clinton soundly among the 21 percent who listed no religious affiliation, with 45 percent to her 29 percent.
Voters who are Jewish, Muslim or of other minority faiths did not comprise a statistically large enough percentage of those polled in either party to analyze their voting patterns.
Unlike with Republicans, the pollsters did not ask Democratic voters whether they considered themselves evangelical or born-again, or how important a candidate's religion was to their decision.
Obama is a Congregationalist whose absentee father was a secular Muslim and whose mother was a non-churchgoing Protestant. He speaks in evangelical terms about his adult conversion experience while working, in his 20s, as a community organizer in Chicago. He named his campaign autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, after the title of a favorite sermon he heard in his home congregation, Trinity United Church of Christ.
Clinton is a lifelong Methodist who has become more outspoken about her faith in recent years. She reportedly has had a lengthy and active involvement with bipartisan Bible studies connected to the secretive Washington-based Fellowship movement. Dozens of members of Congress, diplomats and other high-ranking Washington officials participate in similar devotional groups. Her husband is a longtime Southern Baptist.
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