Romney v. Obama By Religious Affiliation

I know it's a continuing theme that I have been on on this blog, but the demise of the Romney/Ryan ticket and many of the GOP candidates for the U.S. Senate tracks directly back to the conscious decision to hang the party's hopes and future on the Christianist and white supremacist base of today's GOP.  As we all know, it backfired in a major way.   Maddow Blog has some interesting data that shows that Romney lost every religious group other than Mormons and evangelical Christians.  Do the math - it is impossible to win the general election if one has written off every other religious segment of the population.  Even the efforts of Catholic bishops to threaten their parishioners with eternal damnation failed to deliver a majority of the Catholic vote.   The GOP has become a sectarian party and it is paying the price for subverting religious freedom for all but the most hard right Christian extremists.  Here are some highlights of the analysis:

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life published a report this week based on exit polling data, and I put together a chart based on its findings.    There's a fair amount of interesting data here, though the results among Roman Catholic voters are arguably the most electorally significant. In every recent cycle, Catholics have been considered a key swing constituency, particularly throughout Midwest battleground states, and President Obama narrowly won their support, 50% to 48%. It suggests Republicans' efforts to focus on contraception and reproductive rights had limited success, and the Bishops' lobbying largely fell on deaf ears.

Also note, while many on the right hoped 2012 would be the year that Jewish voters abandoned Democrats, that didn't come close to happening. 

For the purposes of classification, "Other faiths" became a catch-all for a variety of minority religious traditions -- Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others -- which on their own represent a very small percentage of the voting population. Their support for the GOP remains dismal.

And continue to keep an eye on the religiously unaffiliated -- one of the fastest growing segments of the faith population -- which includes atheists, agnostics, and theists who choose not to associate with any specific tradition. Their lopsided support for Obama reinforces yet another demographic problem for Republicans in the coming years.

[T]here was one curiosity in the results: Romney did slightly worse among Mormon voters this year than George W. Bush did in 2004.

A number of surveys have shown that the so called Christian Right is held in a dim view by a significant majority of voters.  Yet this is precisely the demographic the GOP thought would take it to victory.  It is time that the few sane people in the GOP stop drinking the Kool-Aid.