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With the election season heating up, we revisit the issue of whether religion plays a role in voting behavior in the United States. Prof. Gerald De Maio (Baruch College, CUNY) discusses his collaborative research with Louis Bolce on the “religion gap” in American politics. This research indicates that those who attend church more regularly, or who hold more orthodox religious views, tend to vote much differently than seculars. De Maio and Bolce’s research also shows how the media has failed to pick up on this electoral divide while touting other “gaps” — e.g., gender, age, soccer moms — that are much less salient when it comes to predicting election outcomes. We speculate how the “religion gap” will play out in the November 2012 elections.

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Prof. Louis Bolce reveals how the news media view Christian fundamentalists and how that media image translates into elite opinion. Based upon extensive use of survey research, Prof. Bolce notes that even though there has been a growing “religious gap” in the American electorate (larger than the “gender gap”), media outlets did not pick up on this trend in a serious way until the 2004 presidential election. The coverage of fundamentalists and evangelicals at that time tended to reinforce stereotypes about this group among individuals who are most attentive to the news.

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