White Evangelical Vote For Democrats Is Up

One in three white evangelical voters who participated in Super Tuesday primaries in Missouri and Tennessee voted Democratic and overwhelmingly marked their ballots for Hillary Clinton, according to poll findings released this morning by the organization Faith in Public Life and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The poll's results will most likely give pause to Republican and longtime evangelical leaders who have counted on the white evangelical vote--and the issues of abortion and gay marriage--to win elections. A majority of those voters now rank jobs and the economy as their top issues, with abortion and gay marriage down the list.

"The new [evangelical] agenda is in full swing here," Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, said this morning during a conference call with reporters, suggesting that evangelicals are leaving the religious right "in droves." Surveys have found that the biggest white evangelical movement away from the far right has been those under 30: Fifteen percent have migrated away, but only about 5 percent have moved to the Democratic Party. The poll, conducted by Zogby International on Super Tuesday and the day after, indicates that the votes of 52 million moderate and progressive white evangelicals could be in play in this presidential election year, said religion and politics expert Robert Jones.

By Liz Halloran