The new Pew Research Center report on social and political attitudes has gotten considerable national blog attention for its take on Republican and Democratic trend lines. But for this Northwest blog, we were most intrigued by one chart tucked away inside.
It reported on a survey on the components of self-identified Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters, the categories being white evangelical Protestant conservatives, other conservatives, and the moderate/liberal cohort. What got our attention was that this rundown, unlike most others in the report, was broken down by state. Here are a few of those results:
State | Evangelical | other conservative | mod/lib | # surveyed |
Idaho | 23 | 47 | 28 | 148 |
Oregon | 26 | 37 | 34 | 285 |
Washington | 28 | 33 | 37 | 477 |
National | 26 | 35 | 37 | 22,054 |
Utah | 1 | 62 | 32 | 270 |
California | 19 | 39 | 40 | 1,896 |
Montana | 27 | 36 | 36 | 112 |
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The Oregon and Washington numbers match closely, as you might expect, and both are a close match for the breakdowns nationally.
Idaho is a more complex case. On the surface, you notice the somewhat lower number of moderate/liberal Republicans than in other states (compare it, say, to California). And on the surface, the evangelical percentage seems not especially high. But glance down to Utah, and you'll quickly realize that the Mormon component of Republican support is included under "other conservatives" (or maybe, rarely, under moderate/liberal), and not under "evangelical".
If you included the conservative LDS vote with the evangelical vote, you'd likely see half or so, maybe more, of Idaho's Republican vote belonging as well to those two groups. Given that, the 23% evangelical vote the survey noted seems larger than might have been expected - an enormous factor in Gem State politics, maybe bigger than most people there have realized.
And the Democrats?