Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: A fascinating correlation between religion & politics, in 1 map

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' Demographics: You may be looking at the map below and frowning, wondering what the heck oddball historical election it represents:

(click for larger)

Well, it's nothing of the sort: It's all about religion. The red states are those where the plurality of adherents are Evangelical Protestants; the blue states are home to a plurality of Catholics. Yellow are Mainline Protestants, while green states have "Other" as a plurality, which clearly means Mormon in the three states in question.

But despite the topic, are you noticing any particular similarities between this map and the traditional "red" and "blue" states? Only four of the states with an evangelical plurality went for Barack Obama in the 2012 election (Florida, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington), and similarly only four of the states with a Catholic plurality went for Mitt Romney (Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, and Nebraska).

The data powering this map is from the Association of Religion Data Archives, which conducts a decennial census of the country's religious adherents, a topic that the Census Bureau doesn't address out of political concerns. It's worth noting that ARDA's numbers are limited only to persons who actually belong to congregations that they were able to contact. So in all but a handful of the most religiously-fervent states, "unclaimed" is a larger category than any particular religion, encompassing not just non-believers but also those not actively involved in a formally recognized religious movement. (Can't say that I care for the somewhat loaded phrase "unclaimed" either'makes it sound like lost luggage waiting to be picked up at the airport.)

Because of the way "unclaimed" dominates almost every state, I excluded it from this map. While offering a certain clarity, this decision also somewhat skews the results in those northwestern and New England states where the unchurched are most likely a plurality. For instance, you certainly don't think of the Pacific Northwest as being dominated by evangelicals'if anything, those states' red status speaks only to the even-greater absence of Catholics in those states. Nevertheless, if you're curious, the states with the highest "unclaimed" percentages are Maine, Oregon, Vermont, Alaska, and Nevada. We've also put together the entire data set as a publicly available Google Doc. (David Jarman)