How evangelicals will vote in the 2008 election

last updated 8 January 2015

Barack Obama’s outreach to religious voters has grabbed plenty of headlines, said Mark Hemingway in National Review Online’s The Corner blog. But it hasn’t won the Democratic presidential candidate many voters. A new Pew survey indicates that Obama “actually has slightly less support from evangelicals than John Kerry had at this point four years ago.”

That’s one way of looking at the numbers, said Ross Douthat in his blog at TheAtlantic.com. But one could also read them “as good news for Obama,” since his Republican rival, John McCain, is eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in '04. Evangelicals were the clincher for Bush, but they’re lingering uneasiness about McCain “seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.”

Maybe, but the window of opportunity could slam shut soon, said Katie Fretland in the Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp blog. James Dobson, the powerful conservative Christian leader, is talking about the possibility that he will endorse McCain soon. His open endorsement would be a balm for conservatives uneasy about McCain’s social positions, such as his support for stem-cell research and his opposition to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.