I just concluded my research on primary exit polling.

Very interesting stuff.

Go here:

http://youdecide08.foxnews.com/missouri

And click on [Republican Exit Poll Results]

Look at these questions in every State.

1. Frequency of Church attendance.
2. Religious Break down
Look at results for Evangelicals, Protestants, and the NEVER attend chruch crowd.

After you look at every State, a pattern begins to emerge...

Romney lost because Protestants and Particularly evangelicals did not vote for him.
Protestants and Evangelicals were FAR more likely to vote for McCain and then Huckabee.
I found only one state where Romney won the Protestant vote over McCain.

Who were his strongest supporters?? The non-religious.

It seems to me that in the religious bigot blame game between elitest lefty/aethists and the evangelicals. The leftists aethists were pulling the Romney lever and the Evangelicals don't like Mormans.


Ixtellor

__________________
_______________________________________
George W. Bush "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building"

Blasphemy is a victimless crime.

Which is all rather unsurprising to me. My only quibble would be lumping mainstream protestants with evangelical protestants. They vote along different lines. Mainstream protestants are far more likely to vote for a less religious candidate than evangelicals are. McCain can run strong with that crowd. Huckabee with the others. Romney will get a higher percentage of mainstream protestant votes than he will evangelical votes. The non-religious are not at all likely to vote for an evangelical. Mormon? They might. Mormons are seen by non-religious people like me as mostly harmless. Evangelicals? Not so much.

__________________
I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

Sorry, Ix -- you're assuming causality from correlation. Guess what? Whites in California were FAR more likely to vote for Clinton than Obama -- shall we conclude that they're racists, just like we're going to conclude that evangelicals are religious bigots? I mean, whites didn't vote for him, so they're racist, right?

Sometimes it's correlation. Sometimes causation. The trick is knowing the difference. I don't hear large numbers of Californians making racist comments. I do here plenty of evangelicals making anti-Mormon comments. Google it. There's tons of stories about it. It's even fairly well known. They don't even attempt to hide it. Here's a poll for you:

http://www.christianpost.com/article...of_Mormons.htm

Appears to be causation here. The evangelicals even said so.

__________________
I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

Right...because the Republican party is just riddled with leftist atheists who have registered to vote for them.

__________________
All you need to know about the energy crisis:
ANWR Exploration Republicans: 91% Supported. Democrats: 86% Opposed.
Coal-to-liquid R's: 90% YES. D's: 78% NO.
Oil Shale Exploration R's: 90% YES. D's: 86% NO.
Outer Continental Shelf Exploration R's: 81% YES. D's: 83% NO.
Increased Refinery Capacity R's: 97% YES. D's: 96% NO

SUMMARY: 91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of America’s own oil and gas. 86% of House Democrats have historically voted against.

There are also some other issues.

Evangelicals/Catholics are the most likely to vote based on abortion stance and there has been stuff like this around:


"Conservatives in opposition to Mitt Romney have constantly levied the charge of “flip-flopper,” based upon his changing statements on abortion. In an interesting turn, Romney is now being called a flip-flopper… by Planned Parenthood!

The Planned Parenthood website states:

“In 2002, as a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, Romney submitted a candidate questionnaire to the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts stating his support for the Roe v. Wade decision, as well as increased access to emergency contraception and comprehensive sex education in the public schools. He has since reversed his position on all of these issues as he seeks the Republican nomination for President.”
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...icial%26sa%3DN

They can't like that. Whereas I do believe McCain has been rock solid on the issue.

That's because you don't live in California. Let me tell you, California has huge race issues (see Riots, L.A.)

You have a pile of correlation data and you're interpreting it based on anecdotal evidence based on your experiences and a few web pages you've managed to view.

1. No amount of anecdotal information is going to make correlational data casual.
2. You're expressing what's known in psychology as the confirmation bias -- not looking at the data objectively, but instead interpreting it based available preconceptions.

Yeah, bunch of made-up garbage. If you actually take the time to look at the exit polls, Romney does as well or better than McCain among evangelicals.

How does one separate the *conservative* evangelicals from the not-so-conservative ones? Because I think it's the former that are the least likely to vote for Romney based on Mormonism.

Do you think it's fair to say that Romney's faith was a hurdle he had to overcome with conservative Christian voters -- a hurdle that McCain, for instance, didn't? Now, McCain had a different hurdle -- not as conservative as Romney on some important issues -- but his faith wasn't one of them.

__________________
Man up.

I think it's just way too difficult based on the data we're given. What does it mean to be a conservative evangelical? People who go to church more often? That's going to be confounded with gender which in turn might be associated with whether or not you're going to reject Romney based on his Mormonism.

Just looking at the results from Georgia, the evangelical breakdown for each of the three candidates is fairly similar to the gender breakdown: women were more likely to support Huckabee (36/31/30), men had a slight preference for McCain (31/33/31) -- does this mean that it's the women who are bigoted?

I think that about the only thing we can tell without the conditional probabilities is that there wasn't any widespread "anti-Mitt" vote among self-described evangelicals and born-again Christians.

And isn't it a bit arrogant to suggest that the only reason southerners wouldn't vote for Mitt is due to some sort of religious hatred? I don't recall anybody wondering if Huckabee might not have been popular in the North simply due longstanding prejudice against Southerners as dumb, bigoted bumpkins.