The following piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.
As an Atheist, I find the ubiquity of faith-based language and appeals in our political process fascinating. The end of summer marks the kick off of hard-core campaigning leading into the primaries, so I decided to see how candidates are speaking to voters about faith as stumping kicks off in earnest. By signing up for 16 candidate email lists, I learned:
- Seven of the 16 candidates ask supporters to identify themselves as people of faith to receive targeted communications.
Four - Brownback, McCain, Romney and Fred Thompson - offer an option to sign up for a specific coalition email list, the. (there seems to be a template utilized here as it is the same exact thing on all four sites -
see slide # 1).
One candidate - Edwards - offers a separate page on moral leadership, complete with clergy endorsement. From there you can send a "theme" specific email invite to friends, asking them to join, (see slide # 2).
Two, Obama & Huckabee, have a faith specific page with a targeted email list
and blog. (see slides # 3 & # 4, respectively).
The remaining nine - Biden, Clinton, Giuliani, Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich, Paul, Richardson and Tancredo - have no reference to faith or values groups in their email section.
Interestingly, three of the aforementioned nine - Giuliani, Paul, Tancredo - are Republicans. This calls into question a working assumption I had, namely that G.O.P candidates would universally court people of faith.
In the coming months it will be interesting to see how this dialogue unfolds
and how it is handled in the media. As the campaigns mature and old
boundaries are blurred, I look forward to sharing with you how the various
parties try to stump with God. Thoughts on how YOU think I should track candidates and faith? Let me know by commenting on this post.
Take a look below at how some of the candidates are presenting appeals to faith-based voters.
The above piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here. If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.