Commentary by H.G. Listiak

Thursday 12/4/2003

Welcome to my world. Slowly but surely, as the presidential election creeps closer, we've got the pollsters and pundits predicting at an ever increasing pace. Now they've got God in the game, saying the churchgoing Americans will vote Republican by a 2-1 margin while non-churchgoing folk will vote Democrat by a 2-1 margin. This new fault line in American life is the big reason the country is politically polarized, and it's going to get even worse next year. A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and Press claims voters who attend religious services are 63-37 percent for Bush, while those who never attend lean 62-38 percent towards a Democrat. They say it's the widest gap we have ever had between Republicans and Democrats. "It's the most powerful predictor of party ID and voter intention", according to Thomas Mann, a political scholar at Brookings Institute, a center-left Washington think tank. He adds, "In a society that values religion as much as this one, it's significant." They say this gap started growing during the Clinton administration and was even more apparent in the 2000 election when churchgoers went for Bush by a 2-1 ratio and those who never go to church went for Gore by a 2-1 ratio. It all seems so cut and dried to the pollsters, pundits, crank yankers, and think tankers, but I can't honestly buy into it, since I'm your basic non-church-going quasi-conservative, with many aquaintances who are very liberal men of the cloth and clergy, who go to church every day. But if it's true, once again God is in a no-win situation. Not only does he have to deal with Allah, but no matter which way the election goes, here in the U.S. he's going to get a bad rap, as I see it ... I'm H.G. Listiak.