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Posts published in “Day: March 24, 2007”

Breakdowns by party

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?

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The notable exceptions

Portland peace demonstration
Portland peace demonstration

Doesn't take but a few people to miscast the larger number. In Idaho, the Aryan Nations never attracted but a handful of members, yet the entire state wound up besmirched by it. And so, apparently, with last weekend's peace march in Portland.

We follow up here because our report from last Sunday, when we watched the demonstration, reported nothing of the incidents now making the rounds on (mainly conservative) cable talk shows. What we saw seemed almost institutional.

Several linked to this description from an editorial in the Portland Tribune: "This splinter group of protesters showed its support for “peace” by burning a U.S. soldier in effigy. It exhibited its supposedly pacifist nature by knocking a police officer off his bike — an action that brought out the police riot squad. Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag."

Not defensible (we're disgusted by this, just to be clear), and hardly anyone has tried to defend it. It has also provided ammunition for flame-throwers from the right; Michelle Malkin, for example, snapped: "A few fringe actors? Not."

She's wrong: We were there, and while we don't particularly doubt the accurate reporting of the incidents (we'd be interested in seeing more substantiation, though, than we have so far), they were sufficiently isolated and small in scale that we saw nothing like them in a half hour-plus of watching the march from a variety of angles. Out of somewhere in excess of 10,000 people involved, the objectionable actions came on the part of between a dozen and two dozen people.

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