Change of pace, here's a piece of research from a few months ago that I just happened across.
Tobin Grant of the Religious News Service put together a gigantic sample of 36,000 Americans, asking them simply: What religious denomination they consider themselves, whether they feel "the government" (leaving them to assume which) should provide more or less public services, and whether the government should be more or less invested in protecting morality (leaving them to assume what that means). Anyone who's invested more than two braincells in the Standard American debate of "big versus small government" has noticed that a government can be Small Business and Big Morals (or vice versa) at the same time, so I found the result pretty fascinating.
And because both choices were binary, and no one is ever satisfied with the status quo, it sends everybody to their respective corners:
This is a composite I edited together of the
All Religions graph and the
Catholic Specific graph (Catholics in America are so numerous and divided that they deserve to be parsed a bit on their own). The original does say "not for redistribution" but whatever. And if you value your digestion, don't bother reading the comment sections.
Top Right corner is the capital-C Conservative segment, God Guns n' Gays, so on and so forth.
Bottom Left corner is the capital-L Liberal segment, the Secular Humanists and their ilk.
Bottom Right corner constitutes most of the often-dismissed "silent majority", largely non-interventionist voters including but not limited to card-carrying libertarians.
Top Left corner is so often forgotten that it doesn't have a common title, but is surprisingly large, highly religious, non-wealthy, and non-white.
I love this graph because you can watch every political battle of the last forty years play out just by drawing a line between the top-left and bottom-right corners.
The post-Vietnam Democratic party has been a noften wobbly coalition composed of the whole lower-left half, composed of voters who want serious economic support and voters who want the government out of everything it doesn't absolutely need to be involved in. The result is a party platform balanced on that big no-man's-land in the lower left, with politicians who have to be spiritual without being preachy, and economic policies that have to be well-intentioned without being expensive. And the divisions in this structure crop up occasionally, like that "Proposition 8" rollback of gay marriage in California a few years ago, where large numbers of Black and Latino voters who typically vote Democrat turned out against something people usually put in their party's supposed platform. (Because in the end, American voters are people, not party members.)
Meanwhile the post-Carter Republican party has been pretty comfortable, crafting a platform that promises to get the government out of everywhere except your bedroom and foreign wars, which happens to sit right on top of a large portion of highly motivated voters. However, there's a constant if often quiet tension between Southern and Northern Protestants, about how public or private their religious values should be regarding their politics.
Every election cycle in recent memory has revolved around one of three factors:
Whether the largely pacifistic people along the bottom stretch will be motivated enough to vote in numbers comparable to the emotionally charged voters of the upper-right. This is main concern of any politician in New York or California.
How many Latino voters might be motivated to not just vote at all, but put also aside a lot of historical (and current) misgivings to vote for a Republican party that more aligns with their logical values. In Texas and the Sunbelt, Liberals win here by being family-oriented without sounding like soft-skulled hippies, and Conservatives win by sounding protectionist without saying anything racist.
And especially, how many of the Rockefeller Republicans and Reagan Democrats in the bottom-right can be talked into supporting any politician, and whether they'll vote based on their eternally worrisome finances or on how supportive they are of their gay nephew. Pretty much every politician east of the Rockies and north of the Mason-Dixon line is constantly talking about these people, and basically nobody else, because they're easily the most numerous and malleable of all voters, from a party breakdown perspective.