Republicanism, religion and the 'nones'

We need the nones to see the probable meaning of the most recent Gallup analysis of tracking data for the relationship between intensity of religious faith and political party identification.

First, the Gallup analysis concludes:

The percentage of Americans who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party drops from 49% among the highly religious to 26% among those who are not religious. The percentage who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party rises from 37% among the highly religious to 56% among those who are not religious. For comparison, the party figures for November among all adults in these data are 40% Republicans/Republican leaners and 45% Democrats/Democratic leaners.

Thus, Republicans are in the plurality among highly religious Americans. For each of the other three groups, Democrats are equal with or higher in number than Republicans. The Democratic edge expands as religiosity decreases. Among the not-religious group, Democrats have a 30-point edge over Republicans.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that the "percentage of Christians in America" on the decline and nones are on the rise. Specifically:

The non-theist and No Religion groups collectively known as “Nones” have gained almost 20 million adults since 1990 and risen from 8.2 to 15.0 percent of the total population. If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse to answer our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble “Nones” in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.

Thus, as long as Republicanism's principal appeal is to the most fervent Christians, as Gallup found, Republican political influence is likely to continue to wane.

Liddy Dole's 'Godless' attack ad had nothing to do with religion; didn't cost her the race

Those "Godless" ads deployed by losing incumbent U.S. Sen. Liddy Dole (R, N.C.), did not cost her the race with Kay Hagan, as was widely theorized at election time. Or so argues Dole campaign manager Marty Ryall in Politics Magazine:

Many in the media, especially on the liberal side, were quick to point to the ad and claim it backfired, costing Dole the election. Nothing could be further from the truth. When a football team is trailing by 7 points and throws a “Hail Mary” on the last play of the game, they don’t lose because they failed to complete the play, they lose because they were down 7 points and time was running out.

By his account, the ads had nothing to do with religion or faith. They had everything to do with rational, poll-driven campaign strategy. The Dole team had the material, poor though it was. They were losing. They were in the final days of the campaign. They needed a "game changer." Something with shock value that would command media attention:

The “Godless PAC” issue was all we had that could possibly achieve that in the short time remaining. We knew that Hagan would have to respond to the ad. We anticipated her response would be that we were attacking her faith; clearly she could not defend attending the event. So we prepared two ads. The first on the Godless issue, and the second—that would run when her response aired—that we were not attacking her faith, but her judgment.

He excuses the ads' flaws, dismissing without serious consideration the idea that they falsely attacked the faith of a Presbyterian lay leader and saying there was no intent to fake her voice saying "there is no God" in a voiceover. He portrays the latter as the single tactical error of an attack that had no apparent effect on the election's outcome:

Our last tracking poll on the Thursday before the election had us down 8 points and virtually no one was mentioning the Godless issue.

His only regret is that the strategy failed.