{"id":881,"date":"2008-10-24T13:11:08","date_gmt":"2008-10-24T13:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html"},"modified":"2008-10-24T13:11:08","modified_gmt":"2008-10-24T13:11:08","slug":"barna-group-president-a-religi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html","title":{"rendered":"Barna Group President: A Christian &#8216;Bradley Effect?&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"kinnaman.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/211\/import\/imgs\/kinnaman.jpg\" width=\"173\" height=\"140\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"float: right;margin: 0 0 20px 20px\" \/><\/span>Yesterday, The Barna Group&#8211;the nation&#8217;s premiere Christian polling firm&#8211;released a survey showing <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-obama-gaining-among-born.html\">Barack Obama making significant inroads<\/a> among evangelical and born again voters.<br \/>\nAmong born agains, here&#8217;s Barna&#8217;s breakdown:<br \/>\nMcCain 45%<br \/>\nObama 43%<br \/>\nUndecided 10%<br \/>\nThis is a group that Bush won by 62% in 2004, according to Barna.<br \/>\nThe poll found Obama making smaller but significant gains among evangelicals, which Barna sees a much smaller and more theologically orthodox group than born agains. The poll had Obama with 23% support among evangelicals, with 63% expressing support for McCain and 12% undecided. In 2004, George W. Bush won 85% of that vote.<br \/>\nGod-o-Meter called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.barna.org\/FlexPage.aspx?Page=AboutDavid\">Barna Group president David Kinnaman<\/a> (pictured) to ask what stood out to him in the numbers. Turns out that Kinnamin is wondering about a possible &#8220;Christian Bradley effect,&#8221; a variation on the phenomonon by which voters tell pollsters they&#8217;ll support a black candidate but wind up pulling the lever for a white alternative in the voting booth.<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s Kinnaman:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It will be interesting to see whether there&#8217;s something similar&#8230; where Christian voters would say they&#8217;d vote for someone like Obama but when they go to the polls they&#8217;re not comfortable because he doesn&#8217;t stand for the same religious perspective or moral views that they hold. We&#8217;re going to do another poll right before or after the election and it will be interesting to see what shakes out.<br \/>\nCan evangelicals in fact change the hierarchy of their issues? Because abortion is still a very important issue to them. Whether they&#8217;re going to be willing to make those changes and support Obama remains to be seen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kinnaman is also struck by the absence of a born again or evangelical McCain bounce after picking Sarah Palin as a running mate:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Palin has not solidified McCain&#8217;s support [among born again Christians or evangelicals]. Back in May, it was 78-percent of evangelicals for McCain and 9-percent for Obama. In July, evangelicals were 17-percent for Obama and 61-percent for McCain. They&#8217;re currently 23-percent for Obama and 63-percent for McCain. While Obama has had slow but steady in support among evangelicals, McCain has at best plateaued and at worse has lost some support.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kinnaman can&#8217;t explain Obama&#8217;s improvement among evangelicals and born agains from his polling, but he has his theories:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There&#8217;s only so much space in the poll for questions. I want to include a question next time around about why [evangelicals and born again Christians support Obama]. We don&#8217;t know whether it&#8217;s a combination of the economy, outreach on Obama&#8217;s part, ineffective outreach on McCain&#8217;s part, backlash from Palin&#8230;<br \/>\nAs a human being that&#8217;s out traveling around and working on this stuff, you hear a lot of comments at a lot of different levels suggesting that it&#8217;s al  those factors&#8211;Obama&#8217;s effectiveness, that this is a moment to do something different, people are concerned about America&#8217;s reputation, the idea that there&#8217;s deep and holistic changes about the way we think about the world and engage with it. As a researcher, it&#8217;s hard to know which of those has the most weight, what&#8217;s making this election different.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, The Barna Group&#8211;the nation&#8217;s premiere Christian polling firm&#8211;released a survey showing Barack Obama making significant inroads among evangelical and born again voters. Among born agains, here&#8217;s Barna&#8217;s breakdown: McCain 45% Obama 43% Undecided 10% This is a group that Bush won by 62% in 2004, according to Barna. The poll found Obama making smaller&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Barna Group President: A Christian &#039;Bradley Effect?&#039; - God-O-Meter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Barna Group President: A Christian &#039;Bradley Effect?&#039; - God-O-Meter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yesterday, The Barna Group&#8211;the nation&#8217;s premiere Christian polling firm&#8211;released a survey showing Barack Obama making significant inroads among evangelical and born again voters. 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Among born agains, here&#8217;s Barna&#8217;s breakdown: McCain 45% Obama 43% Undecided 10% This is a group that Bush won by 62% in 2004, according to Barna. The poll found Obama making smaller&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html","og_site_name":"God-O-Meter","article_published_time":"2008-10-24T13:11:08+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/files\/import\/imgs\/kinnaman.jpg"}],"author":"dgilgoff","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html","name":"Barna Group President: A Christian 'Bradley Effect?' - God-O-Meter","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/files\/import\/imgs\/kinnaman.jpg","datePublished":"2008-10-24T13:11:08+00:00","dateModified":"2008-10-24T13:11:08+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/#\/schema\/person\/b7e97412c87d7a3b866e9972cc090db4"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/files\/import\/imgs\/kinnaman.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/files\/import\/imgs\/kinnaman.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/10\/barna-group-president-a-religi.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Barna Group President: A Christian &#8216;Bradley Effect?&#8217;"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/","name":"God-O-Meter","description":"A scientific measure of God-talk in the elections","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/#\/schema\/person\/b7e97412c87d7a3b866e9972cc090db4","name":"dgilgoff","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/858\/858da2927809a8352512cd24712c020cx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/858\/858da2927809a8352512cd24712c020cx96.jpg","caption":"dgilgoff"},"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/author\/dgilgoff"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}