Yesterday I pointed out that in the South Carolina Republican primaries this year where Huckabee did well Romney did badly, and vice versa, on a county by county basis. The tendency also seemed in line with the proportion of evangelicals within a county. I did the same analysis with Michigan....
| Correlation between candidate proportion and evangelical proportion by county | |||
| Huck | McCain | Romney | |
| Evanglical proportion | 0.12 | -0.20 | 0.05 |
| Correlation between candidate proportions by county | |||
| McCain | Huck | Romney | |
| McCain | - | 0.05 | -0.58 |
| Huck | - | - | -0.01 |
| Romney | - | - | - |
As you see the correlations are very low (do the coefficient of determination to get a sense of the variance relationships). The only thing that jumps out is that McCain counties tended to not be Romney counties, and vice versa. Probably one can account for this based upon the appeal of Romney's economic message to the eastern part of the state. In any case, South Carolina was quite different.
Note: Data file.
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I'll be jotting notes here. Feel free to jot notes in the comments.
Bernie Sanders re-elected
6:22 PM Central: Virginia reporting good numbers for Obama. Larger turnouts than 2008 in VA.
6:54 PM Central: Senate: 30 DEM seats called, 37 GOP seats.
Let's leave aside decency and morality and try to forget that Romney eliminated funding for a gay teen suicide hotline to curry favor with the theopolitical Right.
Other than Atrios, I'm the only one who thinks Romney would be the hardest Republican for Democrats to beat. Here's why.
I suspect that "evangelical" is too broad a category, and that it's fundamentalist evangelicals who don't like Romney. And I think that fundamentalist evangelicals are especially common in the South.
"Evangelical", as I understand, means having a commitment to outreach and mission work to the point that you try to turn every contact with the unsaved into a conversion opportunity. Whereas "fundamentalist" means people strongly committed to specific theological and other doctrines. If I'm not mistaken, some evangelicals are not fundamentalist, for example a lot of the "new churches" and "prosperity gospel" churches My guess is that these would be less anti-Mormon, and perhaps they are commoner in Michigan.
I was going to say that I think that fundamentalism is especially Anglo-Saxon, whereas evangelism is non-ethnic. According to me theory, Catholics and Lutherans might become eveangelical, but are less likely to become fundamentalist.