25 MILLION "EVANGELICALS" VOTED FOR OBAMA -- WHY?

Joel C. Rosenberg
(Washington, D.C., November 8, 2012) -- As the smoke clears from the wreckage of the Romney defeat on Tuesday, some intriguing yet disturbing facts are coming to light.

Fewer people overall voted in 2012 (about 117 million) compared to 2008 (about 125 million).President Obama received some 6.6 million fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008 (60,217,329 in 2012 votes compared to 66,882,230 votes in 2008). One would think that such a dynamic would have helped Romney win -- clearly it did not. Incredibly, Governor Romney received nearly 1 million fewer votes in 2012 than Sen. John McCain received in 2008. (In 2008, McCain won 58,343,671 votes. In 2012, Romney won only 57,486,044 votes.)

Why? How was it possible for Romney to do worse than McCain? It will take some time to sift through all of the data. But here is some of what we know from the 2012 election day exit polls:

That said, what I looking at most closely is the Christian vote, and here is where I see trouble:

* 42% of the Protestant Christian vote went for Obama in 2012. This was down from 45% in 2008.

* 57% of the Protestant Christian vote went for Romney in 2012. This was up from 54% that McCain won in 2008.

* When you zoom in a bit, you find that 21% of self-identified, white, born-again, evangelical Christians voted for President Obama in 2012. This means of the 117 million people who voted on Tuesday, about 24.7 million were evangelicals who voted for Obama. This was down from 24% of evangelicals who voted for Obama in 2008. (Of the 125 million people who voted in 2008, about 30 million were evangelicals who voted for Obama.)

* You'd think this decrease in evangelical votes for Obama would have helped win the race for Romney, but it didn't.

* 78% of evangelical Christians voted for Romney in 2012. Yes, this was up from the 74% that McCain received in 2008, but it wasn't nearly enough.

* To put it more precisely, about 5 million fewer evangelicals voted for Obama in 2012 than in 2008. Meanwhile, some 4.7 million more evangelicals voted for Romney than voted for McCain. Yet Romney still couldn't win.

It is stunning to think that 25 million self-described evangelical Christians would vote for a President who supports abortion on demand and was on the cover of Newsweek as America's "first gay president." Did these self-professed believers surrender their Biblical convictions in the voting booth, or did they never really have deep Biblical convictions on the critical issues to begin with?

Whatever their reasons, these so-called evangelicals doomed Romney and a number of down-ballot candidates for the House and Senate. This is what happens when the Church is weak and fails to disciple believers to turn Biblical faith into action.