NBC News, I think, has the best election team on television, but they’re wrong about the nation’s religious demographics. Here’s what he said today on First Read:

A brand-new NBC/WSJ/MySpace poll illustrates not only McCain’s challenge come Election Day, but also the challenge the Republican Party could face in future elections. In the poll, Obama enjoys a more than 2-to-1 advantage over McCain among first-time (read: 18-21 year olds) and lapsed voters, 69%-27%. These voters have a much more positive view of Obama (64%-27% fav/unfav rating) than average voters do (56%-33% fav/unfav in last week’s NBC/WSJ survey). What’s more, they have a much more negative view of McCain (29%-59%) and Palin (23%-54%) than average voters do. All of this suggests that a big turnout among these new and lapsed voters would benefit Obama on Election Day. The only question is: Will they turn out? In the poll, 66% say they are certain to vote — but that’s far less than the 90% of all voters who said that in last week’s NBC/WSJ poll. Dem pollster Peter Hart compares this (potential) Obama advantage among young voters with the evangelical advantage Bush built in ’04. Yet unlike Bush, Obama can count on this advantage in every state, not just in the handful of areas where evangelicals are concentrated. What does this mean? The young vote/new voter demographic could provide Obama a 3-5 point buffer with the rest of the electorate.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com

So, what are these ‘handful of areas’ where evangelicals are concentrated? Well, they’re ‘concentrated’ throughout the South, from the suburbs south of Washington, D.C. down to Orlando and across to Dallas and Springfield, Missouri. But that’s not all. They’re not confined to any one area. They are everywhere.

I’ve misplaced my state-by-state polling data indicating the percentage of evangelicals in all 50 states. (I remember it showed that evangelicals make up 20 percent of the population or more in all but a handful of states.) But I’ve come up with another measuring stick that will, more or less, suffice. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life surveyed people nationwide earlier this year. It found that 33 percent of all Americans believe the Bible is “the word of God, literally true, word for word.”

Now, these people aren’t all white evangelicals, there are plenty of conservative Catholics and African American Protestants in this mix, but it gives you some idea of the distribution of doctrinally conservative Christians from coast to coast.

(Click here to see the survey.)

In six states, more than half the population believe the Bible is “the word of God, literally true, word for word.” Those states are: Mississippi (64%), Alabama (54%), West Virginia (53%), Arkansas (51%), Tennessee (51%) and South Carolina (50%). All six voted for George W. Bush in 2004. Pollsters predict all six will vote for John McCain in 2008.

The states with the lowest percentage of people who believe the Bible is “literally true, word for word” are more likely to be blue states: New Hampshire/Vermont (16%) and Massachusetts (18%) are at the bottom of the list. However, there are a few Republican leading states out west like Alaska (19%) that reject biblical inerrancy and vote Republican. Predominantly Mormon states also tend to have fewer biblical inerrantists than the nation as a whole, by the way.

So what about the key swing states, the top purple prizes? Are they more like Mississippi or Massachusetts? Not surprisingly, they’re in between the two extremes. Thirty percent of Pennsylvanians believe the bible is inerrant, as do 37 percent of Missourians, 34 percent of Ohioans and 31 percent of Floridians. And there are a ‘handful of areas’ in Florida (north of Miami/Fort Lauderdale/Palm Beach) where evangelicals are far more heavily concentrated. Ditto with Missouri.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.