Evangelical vote: little change

The screen crawl last night on CNN quoted the AP reporting that "nearly a third of white evangelical Christians" had voted Democratic in Tuesday's mid-term elections, a fact that had Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, crowing last night on "The Daily Show."

Now, your blogstress thinks that's just great but, at the risk of letting the air out of some blue balloons, she takes this opportunity to remind her devotees that that's about the same percentage (68 percent) as voted Democratic in the 2002 mid-term election.

According to the New York Times piece linked above, efforts by religious left activists did have some effect though, in the same article, James L. Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, says that, in the words of reporter Laurie Goodstein, "[t]he religious voters who did switch from Republican to Democrat just mirrored the American electorate as a whole."

Despite the fact that Prof. Guth is the faculty advisor to Furman's College Republicans, your cybertrix is inclined to accept his assessment of the voter breakdown. It's still too early, of course, to know what really happened. More will be revealed...