Economist.com | American values

In 2000, 15m evangelical Protestants voted. They accounted for 23% of the electorate, and 71% of them voted for Mr Bush. This time, estimates Luis Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, they again accounted for about 23% of the electorate—which means that evangelicals did not increase their share of the vote. But overall turnout was much higher, and 78% of the evangelicals who voted, voted for Mr Bush. That works out at roughly 3.5m extra votes for him. Mr Bush’s total vote rose by 9m (from 50.5m in 2000 to 59.5m), so evangelical Protestants alone accounted for more than a third of his increased vote.

Thus, the election revealed that though the evangelical share of the electorate has not increased, evangelicals have become much more important to the Republican Party. According to a study for the Pew Forum by John Green of the University of Akron, Ohio, the proportion of evangelicals calling themselves Republicans has risen from 48% to 56% over the past 12 years, making them among the most solid segments of the party’s base.

This close association between party and evangelicals took a lock-step forward during the campaign. Mr Bush’s chief policy adviser and campaign chairman held weekly telephone conversations with prominent evangelical Christians, such as Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, and the Rev Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. Ralph Reed, formerly the executive director of the Christian Coalition, became the campaign’s regional co-ordinator for the south-east—a move that encapsulates the integration of evangelical voters into the party.

Hitherto, evangelical Protestants have been the objects of Republican outreach. This time, they took the initiative themselves, asking for and distributing voter registration cards and collecting the signatures required to put anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot. As the church organisers tell it, the Republican Party was left playing catch-up. …

Remember, too, that the religious right and religious America are far from being the same things; Mr Bush’s moral majority depended on the votes of other religious groups as well. Catholics, with 27% of voters, are more numerous than evangelicals, and, unusually this year, the Republican candidate won a majority of the Catholic vote (52% against 47%).

Though Mr Bush did especially well among white Catholics and those who attended Mass regularly, he also increased his share of the Hispanic Catholic vote from 31% in 2000 to 42%. This alone accounts for the inroads he made into the Hispanic vote, which has traditionally gone to Democrats by two to one. In all, calculates Mr Lugo, 3.5m more Catholics voted for Mr Bush in 2004 than in 2000. Thus, they were as important to his increased majority as evangelical Protestants were.

This points to another new development. The election seems to have consolidated the tendency of the most observant members of any church, regardless of denomination, to vote Republican.