If there is one thing Americans dislike, it is ambiguity. From tie ball games, to movies with inconclusive endings, to arguments with shades of gray, a lack of resolution tries our patience.
It is not surprising, then, that most Americans were disappointed by the 1996 election. Aside from the usual foolishness, insults, and scandal, the election results were essentially inconclusive, a wash, no decision. Indeed, government gridlock was affirmed in grand fashion: President Clinton won (only the third Democrat this century to be re-elected) while the Republicans retained control of the Congress (for the first time in 68 years). And even this historic standoff represented a tepid “49 percent solution”: Clinton and the Republican Congress each received just under a majority of the votes cast-by just less than a majority of eligible voters.
These ambivalent results were especially galling given the political buildup to 1996. The 1992 and 1994 contests had been dramatic. Just four years before, an incumbent president was rejected, and an independent candidate garnered nearly one-fifth of the vote. Two years later, in 1994, the minority Republicans unexpectedly gained control of Congress for the first time in 40 years and captured the lion’s share of state and local offices to boot. The forces unleashed by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich seemed headed for a showdown in 1996, if not at the OK Corral, at least in the voting booth.
There are, of course, many reasons why the expected confrontation fizzled. For one, election contests involving incumbents inevitably turn on the state of the economy and the world. Relative prosperity and peace certainly helped both Clinton and the congressional Republicans. In addition, the campaigns of the challengers, Bob Dole and Ross Perot, can be charitably described as ineffective, while the president campaigned masterfully. Almost the reverse occurred at the congressional level: Democrats proved only a partial match for the new Republican majority. But perhaps the most important reason for “the 49 percent solution” is that Americans are deeply divided over the direction of the country.
Nowhere is this phenomenon better illustrated than in the voting behavior of religious groups. If one were to ask “where were the country’s religious communities in the great disappointment of 1996?” the simple answer would be “at odds with themselves.”It is often said that America has lost its moral bearings, and if our religious communities are our moral navigators, then they seem headed in many different directions.
Standard postelection analyses contain very little on the role of major religious groups, despite considerable attention to religion during the fall campaign and extensive campaign efforts by the Christian Coalition, the Interfaith Alliance, and a host of other groups. This void reflects the limitations of exit polls, upon which most commentary is based, from the New York Times to cnn. Here we hope to fill the “religion gap” with a brief report on the voting behavior of the major religious traditions. These data are based on the second National Survey of Religion and Politics, conducted at the University of Akron, with a grant from Pew Charitable Trusts, right after the 1996 polls. This survey produced a random sample of 2,000 adult Americans and a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.
The table reports the voting behavior of religious groups in the American electorate, including evangelical, mainline, and black Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, and the secular population. With one exception, we have divided these groups into high or low levels of religious commitment, measured by the respondents’ degree of involvement with their religion. The logic of this categorization is straightforward. Together these religious traditions account for 96 percent of the American electorate. More important, these groups represent distinctive and often conflicting cultural values that have historically played a significant part in the American political process. Religious commitment matters because the individuals most involved with their religious communities are most likely to reflect these distinctive cultural values and receive politically relevant cues from religious sources.
What contribution did these religious groups make to the 49 percent solution? A good place to begin is with Protestants, always a fractious bunch. In 1996, high-commitment evangelicals were the strongest supporters of the Dole/Kemp ticket (75 percent) and even stronger backers of Newt Gingrich and Republican control of the House of Representatives. Their 1996 vote for the House gop (79 percent) was even higher than in 1994 (75 percent).2 High-commitment evangelicals are the key target of the Christian Coalition and other Christian Right organizations, who worked hard for the Republican ticket despite a lack of enthusiasm for Bob Dole.
In striking contrast, low-commitment evangelicals gave 49 percent of their votes to Dole, only modestly more than they gave Bush in 1992, and much less than their support for Republican House candidates in 1994 (60 percent) and 1996 (steady at 60 percent). Low-commitment evangelicals are very difficult for organizations like the Christian Coalition to reach-they are not regularly in church settings-and hence must be approached by candidates and parties. Evidently House Republicans did a better job in this regard than did the top of the ticket.
Dole and Kemp also got a majority of mainline Protestants, the traditional heart of the Republican coalition. In 1996, religious commitment was less important for the mainline than for evangelicals, with more than half of both categories voting Republican for president. These numbers represent little change from 1992 for the high-commitment group, but a significant gain for the less committed. But there was a notable reversal with regard to the House vote: Here the low-commitment mainliners (60 percent) are stronger backers of Gingrich and company than their high-commitment coparishioners (45 percent). This situation may reflect the intense criticism directed at gop budget priorities from thousands of mainline pulpits.
In 1996, as in the past, African Americans in historically black Protestant denominations voted heavily Democratic, giving President Clinton 90 percent or better of their votes. Here differences in commitment have only modest and idiosyncratic effects.
Roman Catholics were badly divided in 1996. Non-Hispanic high-commitment Catholics (“High Commitment” on the table) split evenly between Dole and Clinton-46 percent apiece. This figure is not far from their backing of the gop in 1994 and 1992 and very similar to their support of House Republican candidates in 1996 (50 percent). Note that Clinton gained somewhat over his 1992 showing with this group and made similar gains among low-commitment Catholics. But low-commitment Catholics also moved in a Republican direction in 1996 House voting (49 percent, up from 43 percent in 1994). Thus, non-Hispanic Catholics are up for grabs politically-a classic swing vote. A big boost for the Democrats came from Hispanic Catholics (which we separate from Anglos because of their distinctive voting habits). The small number of cases here precludes examination of the levels of religious commitment, but the patterns appear to resemble those for black Protestants.
The two remaining groups, Jews and the secular population, were strong supporters of Clinton and the congressional Democrats. Regardless of religious commitment, Jews are among the most loyal Democratic voters, surpassed only by black Protestants. And here we also see the same idiosyncracies as with blacks: high-commitment Jews were both strongest for Clinton and Republican House candidates (27 percent of high-commitment Jewish voters supported Republican House candidates, in comparison to only 11 percent of low-commitment Jewish voters).
As for seculars, we have divided them into two groups: those who display no signs of religious identification and others with at least some, albeit vestigial, religious connections. A majority of both groups backed Clinton in 1996 and 1992, but the pure seculars were far more Democratic in their House vote (only 29 percent supported Republican House candidates, compared to 46 percent among seculars with some religious tendencies) and showed a sharper decline in gop voting between 1994 and 1996.
What about Ross Perot? Of course, his overall support fell dramatically from 1992 and in every category in the table. In both years, however, there was a consistent pattern: Perot was most popular among the low-commitment groups, and his strongest backing came from the pure seculars. Indeed, Perot’s biggest losses occurred among high-commitment religious groups. These patterns reveal that Perot’s “alienated center” is made up of people disconnected from religious institutions as well as other aspects of social life. This pattern also suggests why Clinton outgained Dole among former Perot voters.
The overall level of balloting was abysmal in 1996; one has to reach back to 1924 to find similarly poor results. Unfortunately, surveys routinely yield inflated reports of turnout, and ours is no exception: Some 60 percent of our respondents claim to have voted, a full 11 percent above the official turnout rate of 49 percent. However, if we assume that this 11 percent “fudge factor” can be distributed evenly across the sample, we can offer some educated guesses on turnout with these groups.
First, it appears that the high-commitment categories in all our traditions turned out at markedly higher rates than their low-commitment coreligionists (Jews were a very modest exception). Second, the highest turnout occurred among high-commitment mainline Protestants, with about two-thirds going to the polls, followed by high-commitment evangelicals at about three-fifths and then Catholics at just over half. Interestingly, pure seculars showed one of the lowest turnout rates, at roughly two-fifths. These numbers appear to represent modest declines over 1992. Thus, the efforts of religious groups from the Christian Coalition to the Interfaith Alliance may well have helped keep turnout up among their constituents.
To summarize, the Dole/Kemp team received most of their votes from white Protestants, with two-fifths coming from the two evangelical groups, and another one-quarter from the two mainline categories. By far their strongest support came from high-commitment evangelicals.
In 1996, then, the GOPmight be described as having gone overwhelmingly Protestant. The problem is that Protestants are neither numerous enough nor united enough to elect a president on their own. On the first count, a strong biracial coalition would be necessary, and this seems unlikely anytime soon, and on the second count, the divisions between mainline and evangelical Protestants, and among high- and low-commitment members of these traditions, are severe. Expanding the Republican coalition to non-Protestants is thus an inviting, but a no less daunting, prospect.
In this regard, the Republican congressional coalition is instructive. In 1996 and 1994, Newt Gingrich and company enjoyed a significantly broader base of support than George Bush in 1992 or Bob Dole in 1996. White Protestants made up less than three-fifths of their votes, to which they added a substantial Catholic (one-fifth) and secular vote (one-sixth). In addition, the House GOPdid quite well among low-commitment voters, precisely where Dole lost out to Perot and Clinton. Of course, the congressional Republicans did this with hundreds of candidates across the country, each of whom could tailor his or her message to local circumstances-a luxury rarely afforded presidential campaigns. Congressional Democrats did this far better for 40 years, even when their presidential tickets floundered.
Clearly, the problems facing the Republicans at the presidential level are far from trivial and go beyond the personality of a particular candidate or the mistakes of a given campaign. The Republicans have a strong social-issues constituency, focused on high-commitment evangelicals, and a strong economic-issues constituency, centered on mainliners who are united in a distaste for the welfare state-a sort of “not the liberal Democrats” alliance. Each of these constituencies is critical; at the moment, gop presidential candidates “can’t win with ’em and can’t win without ’em.” One can easily understand Dole’s on-again, off-again courting of the Christian Right and supply-side libertarians.
What about the Clinton/Gore ticket? The Democratic presidential coalition was a classic “coalition of minorities,” with black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, Jews, and seculars making up nearly 45 percent of their total voters. These religious minorities are the pillars of the Democratic vote. Another 17 percent of the Clinton vote came from non-Hispanic Catholics. If the 22 percent of the Democratic vote that comes from seculars is added to supporters from the low-commitment groups, it gives the Democrats a “less religious” constituency that rivals the size of religious conservatives in the gop. President Clinton may have campaigned as a “new” Democrat, but he won like an “old” Democrat: by assembling a large and diverse coalition. Clinton deserves a great deal of credit for pulling off this feat-just two years after the voters decisively repudiated “big government,” the glue that traditionally held together such coalitions among Democrats.
One has to wonder, however, just how stable such a coalition will be in the present political environment. Prosperity and the prospect of Newt Gingrich had a powerfully unifying effect on this coalition-a “not the right-wing Republicans” alliance-but this effect is unlikely to last. Indeed, the elements of this coalition have deep-seated antagonisms among themselves over issues as varied as affirmative action and welfare reform. In this regard, the secular constituency may in the long run present the Democrats with as much trouble as religious conservatives occasion the Republicans. Many elements of the Democratic coalition are deeply religious and potentially at odds with the social-issue liberalism of seculars. And because seculars are hard to mobilize through less public means-they don’t belong to readily identifiable groups, such as churches-appeals to them may have to be made in a high-profile fashion.
So far Bill Clinton and his closest associates have avoided overturning the religious apple cart in the Democratic party. But there have been some close calls. Support for gays in the military and late-term abortions, not to mention Democratic attacks on the “Religious Right” in the 1994 campaign, led many Democrats to see the President as a cultural liberal, subversive of community and common sense. The Clinton of the 1992 and 1996 campaigns is much more palatable. His “new covenant” and “bridge to the future” suggested support for both personal responsibility and economic advancement. The difficulties facing the Democrats are thus no less daunting than for the Republicans: to meld together a welter of cultures by respecting real values and expanding real opportunities.
In religious and cultural terms, as in other respects, the 1996 election was a standoff, with the president assembling an alliance of cultural minorities and the congressional Republicans putting together an equally diverse alliance against the welfare state. This “49 percent solution” is inherently unstable, with no real winners and lots of potential losers. At this juncture, there is no obvious resolution to this stalemate, a fact that irritates the electorate to no end. Indeed, much of the disgust with the political process reflects a deep sense that political conflict resolves nothing. Clearly, the country would benefit from consensus-building outside the electoral process, a task religious communities and other cultural groups are uniquely qualified to pursue.
Religion and Voting Behavior
1996 President:
Evangelical:
High Commitment: Dole–75%, Clinton–21%, Perot–4%
Low Commitment: Dole –49%, Clinton–38%, Perot–13%
Mainline:
High Commitment: Dole–55%, Clinton–40%, Perot–5%
Low Commitment: Dole–54%, Clinton–40%, Perot–6%
Black Protestant:
High Commitment: Dole–5%, Clinton–95%, Perot–0%
Low Commitment: Dole–10%, Clinton–90%, Perot–0%
Catholic:
High Commitment: Dole–46%, Clinton–46%, Perot–8%
Low Commitment: Dole–41%, Clinton–46%, Perot–13%
Hispanic Catholic: Dole–29%, Clinton–71%, Perot–0%
Jewish:
High Commitment: Dole–9%, Clinton–86%, Perot–5%
Low Commitment: Dole–10%, Clinton–80%, Perot–10%
Secular:
Pure: Dole–26%, Clinton–52%, Perot–22%
Some Religious: Dole–38%, Clinton–53%, Perot–9%
Religion and Voting Behavior
1992 President:
Evangelical:
High Commitment: Bush–65%, Clinton–20%, Perot–16%
Low Commitment: Bush –44%, Clinton–36%, Perot–20%
Mainline:
High Commitment: Bush–55%, Clinton–34%, Perot–11%
Low Commitment: Bush–43%, Clinton–39%, Perot–18%
Black Protestant:
High Commitment: Bush–6%, Clinton–90%, Perot–4%
Low Commitment: Bush–4%, Clinton–90%, Perot–7%
Catholic:
High Commitment: Bush–47%, Clinton–40%, Perot–13%
Low Commitment: Bush–37%, Clinton–40%, Perot–23%
Hispanic Catholic: Bush–21%, Clinton–69%, Perot–0%
Jewish:
High Commitment: Bush–23%, Clinton–65%, Perot–13%
Low Commitment: Bush–10%, Clinton–71%, Perot–19%
Secular:
Pure: Bush–25%, Clinton–48%, Perot–28%
Some Religious: Bush–33%, Clinton–45%, Perot–22%
Political scientists Lyman Kellstedt (Wheaton College), John Green (University of Akron, where he directs the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics), James Guth (Furman University), and Corwin Smidt (Calvin College) are the authors most recently of Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front, just published by Rowman & Littlefield.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 24
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