{"id":180,"date":"2011-02-28T07:38:32","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T07:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html"},"modified":"2011-02-28T07:38:32","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T07:38:32","slug":"union-gap-v-god-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html","title":{"rendered":"Union Gap v. God Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s pretty much the bottom line in Nate Silver&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/26\/the-effects-of-union-membership-on-democratic-voting\/\">regression analysis<\/a><br \/>\nof the impact of 23 demographic factors on partisan voting in the 2008<br \/>\nelection. His object was to see how much of a difference union<br \/>\nmembership makes to the likelihood of voting Democratic. The answer is:<br \/>\nin the same ballpark as evangelicals and weekly worship attenders (God<br \/>\ngap) were likely to vote Republican.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the relative impact of these demographic preferences varied,<br \/>\nbecause the size of each group varies About 10 percent of 2008 voters<br \/>\nwere union members. Roughly a quarter were evangelicals. And nearly a<br \/>\nhalf were weekly attenders. Silver calculates that the union vote<br \/>\nboosted Obama&#8217;s (and the Democratic congressional) total by 1.2 percent.<br \/>\nDo the arithmetic and that means a three percent boost from<br \/>\nevangelicals and a six percent boost from weekly attenders for the GOP.<br \/>\nLook for both of those numbers to increase in 2012.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"uniondem1.png\" src=\"https:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/uniondem1.png\" class=\"mt-image-center\" style=\"text-align: center;margin: 0pt auto 20px\" width=\"473\" height=\"392\" \/><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s pretty much the bottom line in Nate Silver&#8217;s regression analysis of the impact of 23 demographic factors on partisan voting in the 2008 election. His object was to see how much of a difference union membership makes to the likelihood of voting Democratic. The answer is: in the same ballpark as evangelicals and weekly&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Union Gap v. God Gap - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk<\/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\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Union Gap v. God Gap - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That&#8217;s pretty much the bottom line in Nate Silver&#8217;s regression analysis of the impact of 23 demographic factors on partisan voting in the 2008 election. His object was to see how much of a difference union membership makes to the likelihood of voting Democratic. The answer is: in the same ballpark as evangelicals and weekly&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-02-28T07:38:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/uniondem1.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Union Gap v. God Gap - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Union Gap v. God Gap - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"That&#8217;s pretty much the bottom line in Nate Silver&#8217;s regression analysis of the impact of 23 demographic factors on partisan voting in the 2008 election. His object was to see how much of a difference union membership makes to the likelihood of voting Democratic. The answer is: in the same ballpark as evangelicals and weekly&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html","og_site_name":"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","article_published_time":"2011-02-28T07:38:32+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/uniondem1.png"}],"author":"Mark Silk","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/union-gap-v-god-gap.html","name":"Union Gap v. 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God Gap"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/","name":"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","description":"Beliefnet Voices","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/?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\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d","name":"Mark Silk","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","caption":"Mark Silk"},"description":"Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}