January 9, 2008 | 9:16 am

How N.H. Democrats voted based on religion

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Follow JewishJournal.com on

From the Christianity Today Live Blog:

This was supposed to be the year the Democrats got religion. Too bad somebody forgot to tell the pollsters. One of the big untold stories of the Iowa caucus is that only Republicans were asked about their religious affiliation. The problem isn’t just that we don’t know how many Iowan evangelicals voted for the various Democrats (it would be interesting to see, for example, if Edwards scored as well among evangelicals as he did among conservatives). The problem is that we don’t know whether Democrats as a whole have succeeded in attracting more evangelical voters. (Usually somewhere between one quarter and one third of evangelicals vote Democratic.) I’m told we’ll see some Iowa caucus poll results soon (not from Edison Media Research, the company that does most of these entrance and exit polls) that may shine some light on the religion questions. The good news is that Edison Media Research has repented, and today’s New Hampshire exit polls (via CNN [Rep | Dem] and MSNBC [Rep | Dem] )had many religion questions for both Republicans and Democrats. Clinton, it seems, took the moderately religious (those who attend church monthly or a few times a year), while Obama took the devout (weekly attenders) and the nonreligious (those who never attend church). Roman Catholics (the largest religious group among New Hampshire Democrats, with 36% of voters in that primary), overwhelmingly chose Clinton (43%) over Obama (28%). Those who said they had no religion supported Obama (47%) over Clinton (28%), and that formed a remarkable 22 percent of Democratic voters.