I am currently working on a senior honors thesis about the religious right. I've seen several headlines today that say while Obama won the Catholic vote, Democrats didn't really make inroads among the evangelical community - but I disagree.  I've spent some time today looking at consortium and CBS exit polls from every presidential election since 1972, and a preliminary scan shows three very interesting findings:

• Barack Obama received a higher share of the Protestant vote, 45%, than any other Democratic nominee since at least 1972, the earliest year for which I have data. By comparison, in 2004 Kerry received 40% of the Protestant vote and in 2000 Gore received 42%. The previous high was 43.7% for Jimmy Carter in 1976. The low is George McGovern in 1972 with 28.4%.

• The general "Protestant" category includes the liberal mainline denominations. Unfortunately, voters have only been asked if they consider themselves white evangelical or born-again in 2008 and 2004. In '04, 23% of voters said yes, and in '08, 26%. Kerry received 21% of that vote, and Obama 24. (In 2000, voters were asked if they were part of the religious right, and only 14% said yes. The term "religious right" is likely seen as offensive, so fewer voters were willing to claim it as a label. Of those voters, 18% voted for Gore.)

• Barack Obama outperformed both Al Gore and John Kerry in terms of church attendance. More than weekly - Gore 36%, Kerry 35, Obama 43. Weekly - Gore 40, Kerry 41, Obama 43. Monthly - Gore 51, Kerry 49, Obama 53.

I'm not going to read anything into these numbers tonight; that's what my thesis is for. But the raw data is interesting, and suggests that the Emerging Church movement (Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, etc.) may indeed be a strong ally for progressives, and that Leah Daughtry can keep on rockin'.

Cross-posted from my personal blog, The Wayward Episcopalian.

One day I will be an old man sitting in a rocking chair yelling at those damn kids to get off my lawn. When that day comes and I look back and reminisce on my college years, the memory of last night's celebration will without a doubt be my strongest, fondest, and all around best.

I have a new senator; her name is Jeanne.

I am watching election returns at the only Kappa Kappa Kappa frat, commonly called Trikap (founded in the 1850s, mind you), in the country with the rest of the Dartmouth College Democrats, ie, the first youth voters to ever turn out in full force. This college's eligible turnout was around 80%, and we couldn't be happier. Forgive me for making a non-weekend front-page post, but as someone who has lived just 15 minutes from the former Aryan Nations compound in North Idaho, I would like to note that there is a certain delicious and beautiful irony in the fact that we are celebrating the election of the nation's first black president in a Greek house called KKK - a frat that has its own African-American president.

With Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire all called, I'd like to be one of the first, if not the first, to say:

YES WE DID! YES WE DID! YES WE DID! YES WE DID! YES WE DID!

For the past week or so, McCain's buzz phrase has been "Dewey Defeats Truman." Every major national poll shows Obama leading McCain by at least three points, and the ones with the methodologies I trust the most show him up by even more (Gallup Expanded has him at 9). John McCain says don't be deceived; the polls are wrong now just like they were in 1948. The Washington Post has joined him in questioning their accuracy:

Could the polls be wrong? Sen. John McCain and his allies say that they are. The country, they say, could be headed to a 2008 version of the famous 1948 upset election, with McCain in the role of Harry S. Truman and Sen. Barack Obama as Thomas E. Dewey, lulled into overconfidence by inaccurate polls.

I would suggest that Senator McCain and the Post staff bone up a little on their recent American history. The 1948 polls that showed Dewey ahead of Truman were quite possibly accurate for the most part (see the NPR reference below). The problem was that pollsters stopped polling a week ahead of election day, and Truman's barnstorming whistle-stop tour around the country lambasting the "do nothing" Congress had a huge impact. It's possible that John McCain could come up with a similarly effective and powerful message, but he's got a lot less time in which to do it, and people are a lot angrier at Bush than they were at Truman, sooo... I doubt it.

It's vital to remember: polls don't predict what will happen in an election several days or weeks down the line; they only tell you what would happen if the election were held at the time the poll was in the field. The Tribune headline got the story wrong in 1948 because it relied on out-of-date polls, not because those polls were wrong. (Although, as NPR noted yesterday, it is true that those polls weren't nearly as scientific as the ones we have now. The polls were conducted by phone, and while that's the best way to conduct a poll today, it wasn't such a hot idea when only the Dewey-leaning rich had them.) A week prior to Election Day, Dewey may well have defeated Truman. But things change. Fortunately for America, they've never changed a full 6.4 points in just 3 days.

In 2008, out-of-date polls are the absolute last of our worries. Barring Osama bin Laden's capture, I predict that Senator Obama will win this race and handily so; if not in a popular vote landslide, then almost certainly in an electoral bloodbath.

(Adapted from a post at my personal blog.)

While my opinion of Keith Olbermann has not dropped quite as dramatically as some other folks', I figured there are enough people around here still angry at him from the primaries to make this worth sharing. Here is Ben Afflek's amusing angry man impression of KO on last night's Saturday Night Live.

With barely 48 hours until polls all over this country finally close on the 2008 presidential election, I figured it time to make my White House and Senate predications. I'm going to stick them here in the diaries rather than on the front page because my educated guesses are hardly worth that level of attention; all of us are arm-chair prognosticators.

I believe that Barack Obama will win the White House with 364 electoral votes and that the Democrats will pick up 7 Senate seats, giving them 57 (58, but I expect Lieberman to fly the coop). These predictions are based on polls from RealClearPolitics, statistical analysis from FiveThirtyEight, and my own understanding of history, geography, and culture.

I've shied away from posting lately because others are far better than I at statistical election analysis, fundraising, and inspiring folks to act, which is what matters this time of year. But, it is important to step back from the polls and statistics for just a moment every now and again to remember just how amazing this election is. This story from the Austin (TX) Statesman has to be the single most marvelous thing about this campaign. It speaks volumes.

Daughter of slave votes for Obama: 109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones...

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

This is something most folks on this website may already know, but it's just one of those right wing narratives we've got to debunk between now and November.

One of the more common attacks on Joe Biden, Barack Obama's running mate and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is that he committed plagiarism during his 1988 presidential campaign and during law school in 1965. These accusations are patently false and highly irrelevant, and anyone who bothered to do a little research wouldn't sink to the level of repeating them.

Biden always quoted and cited British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock in his stump speeches, but forgot to make the citation during his closing remarks at an Iowa State Fair debate. He writes in his memoirs that the memory slip was because he'd spent the previous few days in his role as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee preparing for Robert Bork's confirmation hearings rather than properly preparing for the debate. He readily admits that he made a mistake in not gathering the reporters afterwards to say, "Hey guys, I messed up."

The dropped citation only became a scandal when Michael Dukakis campaign manager John Sasso leaked a tape of the slip-up. Reporter after reporter refused to print the rubbish, until New York Times reporter (now columnist) Maureen Dowd took the bait and ran a hack job. The result? Dukakis fired Sasso, the man who had convinced him to get in the race in the first place. Now, why would Dukakis fire Sasso if his allegations were true?

Several other plagiarism myths have also been debunked, but not until they had formed a pattern in voters' minds, much like the Bush-is-stupid, Gore-is-a-liar, and McGovern-is-weak memes. Biden was accused of quoting Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey without attribution, but says the quote was slipped into his stump speech by irresponsible aides like Pat Caddell. He was also accused of plagiarizing a law school paper in 1965, but the Delaware Supreme Court's Board on Professional Responsibility cleared him of any wrong-doing. The paper was poorly written and used the wrong citation format, but was still completely honest - lazy and stupid, but not unethical.

Even if Biden had done something wrong, which of course he didn't, these scandals date back 20 and 43 years, to before his life-altering brain aneurysms and "long slog back to credibility." Given the challenges we face in today's world and the fact that people change with time, a non-scandal from a different era should not be an issue. I've met with Biden and his family members on numerous occasions, and am proud to be a long-time supporter. He is one of the most honest and upstanding persons in all national politics, and if this nation has its priorities in line, it will choose to focus on his authorship of the Violence Against Women Act and expertise on Middle Eastern affairs rather on smear journalism from days gone by.

Cross-posted from my personal blog, The Wayward Episcopalian.