Dems Losing Religious Voters

There's an interesting piece at Slate.com on the failed efforts of Dems to connect with religious voters. After their efforts in the days following the 2004 elections, they've actually lost ground:

When Democratic Party leaders "found God in the 2004 exit polls," as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. likes to say, no one expected instant results. Many of the party's early efforts to attract religious voters, after all, were scattershot and not a little awkward. No one knew quite what the "faith staffer"—a new breed of legislative aide—was supposed to do, and random-seeming insertions of Bible verses into floor speeches came off as Tourette's syndrome for Democrats. In the longer run, though, the new focus on forming relationships with religious communities and voters has been the right move for a party that had essentially limited its religious outreach to black churches. Democratic campaign trainings now smartly include tips for communicating with Catholic voters. Candidates are starting to appear on religious radio outlets. And Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has even stopped saying things to intentionally antagonize evangelicals.

Which is why it is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, shows that while 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is "friendly" to religion. That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that—in other words, a 16-point plunge over three years. The decline is especially troubling because it cuts across the political and religious spectra, encompassing liberals and conservatives, white and black evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The Republican Party also experienced a drop in the percentage of Americans who say it is friendly to religion—eight points over the past year. But that decrease occurred mostly among white evangelicals and Catholics and the reasons for it seem obvious: Two years of broken promises by the GOP.

In contrast, the Democrats' crumbling credibility on religion wasn't caused by one thing. And that may be the problem. All at once, the party needs to counter conservative attacks, change the conventional wisdom that Democrats just aren't religious, and expand the party's reach to moderate religious voters. To do that, the party will need a little more faith and a whole lot more work.

Actually, I think writer Amy Sullivan has that in the wrong order. What they really need is a lot more faith, and then they won't have to work so hard.