THIS is an assumption on your part to explain the decline in Protestant support. I refered you to the fact up until this year Protestants outnumbered Catholics in support. If firm conviction on a point such as abortion was not tolerable, we would have seen evidence of this well before this election. This disproves your theory, unless you wish to broaden to state before this election catholics were not comfortable with firm convictions.
In point I reject the very premise protestants are uncomfortable with a rigid obesiance to scripture. What you have offered is your own opinion, which cannot be introduced as fact. From my part as a former Protestant, I am telling you the Liberalization of doctrine is the key reason why support declined. They are misleading their congregations that look to them for spirtual guidance OR chasing them to other non denonminational settings as was true in my case.
I don't know how else to explain it to you.
All serious Christians are pro-life and all serious Christians reject liberal doctrines. All serious Christians for that treason trend Republican. Both Protestants and Catholics have a contingent that are seriously religious and a contingent that are Sunday morning religious.
The question posed by Patent is, why this time the Catholic support for GOP went up in relation to the Protestant support for the GOP. The explanation cannot be in the Democrats' liberalism or the pro-abortion plank because these did not change in 2004. My hypothesis, and hypothesis it is, is that Kerry's statement about the role of religious conviction in political decisions, not the pro-abort stance, tipped the scale for the Catholics.
Do you understand why a Protestant would sympathize with the view that different people believing different things is good, and a Catholic would not?