Evangelicals vote for Donald Trump. No, Ted Cruz. Wait. Aren’t some
Christians voting for Hillary Clinton, a Methodist, and Bernie Sanders, a
Jew?
Why do exit polls draw such a confusing picture of religion’s role in the 2016 presidential race?
Q: How do exit polls work?
A: Exit polls are surveys designed and funded by the news media to help
them report and explain the vote before the full results come in.
Six news organizations — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and The Associated
Press — form the National Election Pool. Survey research directors
consult to craft 15 to 20 questions and determine where and when the
surveys will be conducted.
Then, New Jersey-based Edison Research executes the survey, sending
thousands of interviewers to select polling places on election day. At
each site, interviewers ask a random sample of voters to complete the
three- to five-minute, self-administered questionnaire, said Joe Lenski,
executive vice president of Edison. (The National Election Pool did not
make anyone available for comment for this story.)
Media organizations use the results to announce their projected
winners. The rest of the questions probe voters’ political leanings, the
issues high on their minds and their demographic characteristics such
as race, age, education and gender.
On Tuesday (March 8), there were exit polls in Mississippi and Michigan
but not at the Idaho primary or the Hawaii caucus. On March 15, there
will be surveys in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio.
Q: Do the polls ask about religion?
Yes. And no.
Lenski said the three most common religion questions that may appear are:
- Are you (Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Other Christian, Jewish, Muslim, other or none)?
- Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian? (Yes or No)
- How often do you attend religious services? (More than once a week. Once a week. A few times a month. A few times a year. Never.)
But rarely does the survey include more than one religion question.
Another question asks Republican voters whether shared religious beliefs mattered a great deal in their choice. This is how ABC News could say after Super Saturday
(March 5), “Nearly 4 in 10 voters in Texas said shared religious
beliefs mattered a great deal in their choice, with Cruz pulling in 4 in
10 of them, vs. fewer than 3 in 10 for Trump.”
Democrats, however, are asked about shared “values,” as if only Republicans were religious,
noted Brian Kaylor, a Baptist author who writes for Ethics Daily and
Churchnet. “And only Southern Democrats were asked about church
attendance, so we have no comparison to the Midwest states where Sanders
is winning.”
And unless the religious identification question is asked, no one knows
about the “nones” preferences or how many Jews in Florida might choose
Sanders on March 15th.
Q: Why so much attention to the “evangelical” vote?
A: The 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey found that white “born-again or evangelical” Protestants now account for 19 percent of American adults. They make up a core constituency of the Republican Party.
So the push has been strong to bring them to the polls.
The problem, say critics, is that there’s no universally agreed understanding of the terms “evangelical” or “born-again.”
“Catholics will say yes to ‘evangelical,’ Muslims, even atheists,”
said Mark Gray, senior researcher at the Center for Applied Research in
the Apostolate, a Catholic organization. Gray wrote in his blog that he
might just be a “cranky social scientist” but on the evangelical
question “the data you get back is, for lack of a better term, crap”
that leads to over-counting this subgroup.
For many people, “evangelical is subtext for Christian,” said Kaylor.
“So it comes across like, ‘Are you a Christian, or not?’ Or, more to the
point, ‘Are you a God-fearing American, or not?’”
Something else is driving the vote, not people’s evangelical identification, he said.
Writer Sarah Posner found that “Trumpvangelical'” voters’ real preoccupations are “immigration, Islamophobia and guns.”
Q: Which religion question is most useful?
A: Experts lean toward the question about frequency of church attendance.
People who attend religious services frequently are more active and
engaged in other institutions — such as voting, sociologists say.
But most self-identified religious believers don’t go to church weekly
or often. Neither do many young people and many non-Christians whose
religious or spiritual focus is more centered in personal practice than
in congregational worship.
Another reason worship attendance is problematic for polling: People
tend to exaggerate their attendance and give the socially acceptable
answer, one that puts them in a “good Christian” light.
Q: What exit poll question would critics add?
A: Kaylor leans toward a question assessing how important religion is
in someone’s life. “It captures the nuance of spirituality in religion
in America, ranging from the highly devout to the people with no
religious identity who still find spirituality very important,” he said.
Princeton university sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who recently charged
that pollsters have created an innacurate, shallow and misleading
portrait of American religion, would rather see a combination of
questions.
If the goal of exit poll questions on religion is to learn voters’
value system framework, Wuthnow said, he would drop the
Protestant/Catholic/Jew question.
“As much as I hate it, I would probably keep the evangelical question.
And I would keep church attendance because it is a measure of behavior
and so is voting. But I would add a third question: How important is
religion in your life? You need a salience measure in there,” Wuthnow
said.
The latter would shed light not only on the “no religion” folks but
also many of the nominally religious voters. “Or you might identify as
with a religion,” Wuthnow said, “and not care a whit about it in life
or, in this case, when you vote.”
Cathy Lynn Grossman is senior national correspondent for RNS
Courtesy: Religion News Service
Photo: A poll worker assists voters casting their ballots in the
U.S. Republican presidential primary at a polling place at Kilbourne
Park Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina February 20, 2016.
Photo courtesy: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
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