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Past Event

Brookings Institution/Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Discussion

How the Faithful Voted: Political Alignments and the Religious Divide in the 2004 Elections

U.S. Politics, Religion, Elections, Politics

Event Summary

In the two weeks since the elections, pollsters and pundits have sought to account for values voters—the 22 percent of the electorate (80 percent of whom voted for President Bush) who said that "moral values" was the issue that mattered most to them in deciding how to vote.

Event Information

When

Wednesday, November 17, 2004
3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Where

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036
Map

Contact: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.955.5075

Participants in this discussion, sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Brookings Institution, will discuss what the election's outcome says about the religious and cultural divide in the American electorate; how Bush captured the Catholic vote; the growing political clout of evangelicals; and whether religion helps explain how Latinos and African Americans voted.

Panelists will also comment on a new Pew Research Center poll that examines the influence of religion on the 2004 election.

Transcript

LUIS LUGO: For many in the press and elsewhere, these findings confirm the pre-election conventional wisdom which held that if President Bush won it would be because of a tidal wave of support from religious conservatives driven to the poll by moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The reference there of course was to those 4 million evangelicals whom Karl Rove believes were "missing in action" in 2000.

But the conventional wisdom has not gone unquestioned. In this case, some of the nation's keenest political observers have argued that these exit polls are misleading. In particular, they charge that the poll oversimplified the electorates views by offering them an attractive catch-all phrase, "moral values," that could be attached to a host of different concerns, thus making it very suspect as a means of gauging actual voter priorities.

Read the complete event transcript on the Pew Forum website.

Participants

Moderators

Luis Lugo

Director, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Panelists

Andrew Kohut

President, Pew Research Center; Director, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Co-editor, One Electorate Under God; Columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

Michael Barone

Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report; Co-Author, The Almanac of American Politics

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