It does apply to Protestants, silly! What do you think the breakdown between Evangelical Protestants (who take their religion seriously and are conservatives for the most part) and mainline Protestants, who are flaming liberals, represents?
No one talks of “The Protestant Vote” because the fissure between liberal Mainline and conservative Evangelicals is so obvious.
Well, the fissure between churchgoing, faithful-to-the-bishops, church-teaching accepting conservative Catholics and liberal surburban CINOs is just as great and just as clear—dozens of sociologists have pointed it out.
But do the pundits and journalists do their analysis taking account of that fissure? No, they speak of “The Catholic Vote” as a monolith
when
it
suits
them.
And now some FReeper, in order to bash Santorum, has copied this neat little dishonest trick.
So, if you insist on referring to a monolithic Catholic vote (which does not exist), then don’t ever use the term “Evangelical Protestant vote” again—you have to lump ALL PROTESTANTS into the same bucket.
It’s an exact parallel to “The Catholic Vote”
They always talk about the Protestant vote, when Santorum was run out of office in 2006, he got 39% of the Catholic vote, 42% of the white Catholic vote, 49% of the Protestant vote, 55% of the white Protestant vote, and 71% of the white Evangelical vote.
Catholics are all from a single church, and are baptized members of that church, for Protestants they lump together black churches, homosexual churches, ultra conservative churches like the Southern Baptists, who although they are second in size only to the Catholics, get lumped in with the hard left churches.
Protestants didn't vote for Obama, baptized Catholics did, they are very Democrat. The Protestant vote (all lumped together) has only gone Democrat in 1932, 1936, and 1964, it is the same in California, Protestants vote majority Republican, the majority of Catholics prefer Democrats.