How Republicans lost non-religious voters

[cbayer]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/02/26/how-republicans-lost-non-religious-voters/

BY SCOTT CLEMENT
February 26 at 9:42 am

Tuesday's public spat between an atheist advocacy group and Christian conservatives was full of bluster and drama, all over a CPAC conference booth.

This small theater in the culture wars may be of little consequence beyond Washington, but it highlights a dynamic in which non-religious voters are gravitating steadily away from Republicans, even as Democrats have made few major efforts to galvanize their support.

-snip-

Before the 1990s, Republicans won as much as 43 percent of non-religious voters, but suddenly began losing them by a 2 to 1 margin just as the group began to grow. By 2008, voters with no religion had grown to 12 percent of the electorate - more than Hispanics - and Barack Obama won them in 2008 and 2012 with wider margins than any previous Democrat. Mitt Romney narrowed the gap in 2012, though at 44 points he was hardly competitive. It's important to note that most of these voters are not full-on atheists espousing intense opposition to religion on principle, but agnostic or "nothing in particular."*

Why did this shift happen? In their book American Grace, sociologists David Campbell and Robert Putnam argue that the rising number of "nones" and their increasing Democratic tilt are a reaction to the Republican Party's tightening alignment with Christian conservatives since the 1980s. In one recent example, a 2012 Pew Research Center poll found two in three religiously unaffiliated Americans agreeing that religious conservatives have too much control over the Republican Party.

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[Goblinmonger]

1. So maybe it was a good thing they set up there.

I mean, other than the millions American Atheists must be giving the CPAC, I guess.