The Basics of the God Gap

Repeat after me

“The ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats is mostly a god gap.”

“The ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats is mostly a god gap”

Well ok, actually that’s not totally true for non white voters. But for white voters, yeah it’s mostly a god gap.

Now admittedly, the fact that Republicans are more religious might not seem like a very big revaluation. Well all know this. However the odd aspect of the propaganda wars is that neither side generally acknowledges this very much. That’s probably swing voters generally do not really want a Christian nationalist party or an atheist party that’s intently hostile to religion.

It’s also because some forums, like Twitter, just tend to skew to a much younger and liberal demographic which lends itself to a lot of very different policy debates.

I think it’s sometimes possible that excessively engaged people can lose sight of this fact when they become intensely engaged in the kinds of debates that exist on twitter. Aside from David Shor, the hero of this blog, I would also highly recommend Ryan Burge as a starting point to understand American politics.

Below is a typical graph from Burge:

A very twitteresque take would assume that the increase in Evangelical support amount Republicans is simply a factor of the southern realignment. Evangelicals tend to live in the South, the Nixon strategy of using racism to attract votes brought them into the Republican Party. But this is a very simplistic and questionable assumption. As we can see, Catholic support for the Republican Party also dramatically increased. Catholics of course also tend to live outside the South.

Moreover the problem with twitteresque takes is that they tend to conveniently ignore a lot of other competing evidence. Yes it’s true that southern conservatives tend to score differently on racial resentment scales. They also tend to really dislike legalized abortion and be less supportive of gay marriage. They really believe that life is essentially a prep for an exam and the winners go to heaven while the losers go hell.

That’s a pretty big deal.