Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on August 28, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(3):399-419; doi:10.1093/poq/nfn032
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The Religion Card
Gay Marriage and the 2004 Presidential Election
Address correspondence to David E. Campbell; e-mail: Dave_Campbell{at}nd.edu
In 2004, 13 states had ballot initiatives on whether their state constitutions should include a ban on gay marriage. States with gay marriage ballot propositions, which included the linchpin of Ohio, afforded Republicans the opportunity to raise gay marriage as an issue with an important subset of their base, white evangelical Protestants. We find evidence that white evangelical Protestants had a higher level of mobilization for Bush in states with a gay marriage initiative. However, we also see that secularists were demobilized in these same states, having a lower rate of turnout but not a higher level of support for Kerry.
DAVID E. CAMPBELL is with the Department of Political Science, 217 O’Shaughnessy Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. J. QUIN MONSON is with the Department of Political Science, 745 Spencer W. Kimball Tower, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA. An earlier version of this paper won the award for the "Best Paper on Religion and Politics" at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. We gratefully acknowledge Charles Franklin, Ken Goldstein, David Magleby, and Kelly Patterson for their work in collecting the 2004 Election Panel Study data. We also thank Ashley Grosse and Marion Shultz for their work in collecting the 2004 Campaign Communications Study data as well as Lina Brunton at the Democratic National Committee for providing the sample of registered voters. The data collection was funded in part by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University (BYU). Additional funding for data acquisition and research assistance was provided by CSED, the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at BYU, as well as the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at the University of Notre Dame. Jacqueline Genesio and Christina Ginardi (of Notre Dame) and John Baxter Oliphant (of BYU) provided valuable research assistance for this project. Helpful comments were received from Barry Burden, John Griffin, Stephen Mockabee, Christina Wolbrecht, and three anonymous reviewers. We are especially grateful for the assistance of David Nickerson. However, all errors remain the responsibility of the authors.