Michigan evangelicals like Obama more than Colorado evangelicals do

Mark Silk of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College notes that recent polling data suggests that Obama is running much stronger with evangelicals in the Midwest — Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota in particular — than among evangelicals in other parts of the country:

The latest Quinnipiac poll on the presidential race in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin suggests that there may be a regional aspect to the evangelical vote worth keeping an eye on. In Colorado, evangelicals are backing McCain over Obama by a whopping 78 percent to 16 percent. That’s substantially better than the 74-24 margin by which Bush beat Kerry in 2004. But in the Upper Midwest, McCain’s margin is much lower: 60-27 in Michigan, 62-30 in Minnesota, and just 54-34 in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, the 2004 exit polls failed to ask the evangelical question in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but in Michigan Bush’s margin was 76-24 — which means that Obama is running well ahead of Kerry there at this point. The hypothesis, then, is that Obama the Born Again Midwesterner has a greater appeal to Midwestern evangelicals than he does to evangelicals in other parts of the country — or at least than to the Dobsonian evangelicals of the Mountain West.

Steven Waldman of Beliefnet spoke to Mark Noll, an eminent religious historian from Notre Dame, about possible explanations for that disparity. Noll offered the notion that there are more black evangelicals in Michigan than in Colorado and that evangelicals in the Midwest tended to come more often from a Methodist or Lutheran background, which tend to be more politically moderate, rather than the Baptist or Pentecostal background of evangelicals in Colorado.