According to the Pew Research Center, Americans’ church attendance is a strong predictor of how they’ll vote.
Pew found through 2014 exit polling that voters who attend worship services at least weekly are significantly more likely to vote Republican — 58 percent of those regular worshippers said they backed GOP House candidates at the polls, compared to 40 percent who supported Democrats.
In contrast, those who reported that they “never” attend services leaned heavily in the other direction. Sixty-two percent of those who don’t attend worship services voted Democrat, compared to 36 percent who voted Republican.
In some states, the ties between church going habits and political outcomes are obvious. Church attendance is reportedly lowest in the country in Vermont at 17 percent, for instance, and voters there haven’t sent a Republican to represent them in Washington in almost 15 years.
Thirty-two of the 35 Senators and Representatives serving in the Legislature from the five states with the highest regular service attendance — Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas — are Republicans.
But here in Maine the correlation doesn’t hold.
Maine is behind only Vermont in terms of lowest regular church attendance, according to Gallup research, at 20 percent, and the lack of religious affiliation here has been well documented beyond that.
In 2012, the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies found Maine was the only state in which less than 30 percent of the people belong to a religious denomination or independent Christian church.
A previous Pew study found that less than 40 percent of Mainers pray daily, again the lowest percentage in the country.
Circling back around again to Gallup, the firm found that 65 percent of Mainers reported rarely or never attending worship services, which — when held up against the strong relationship between church attendance and politics found by Pew — should indicate this is a very blue state.
But while Maine recently went through three decades with Democratically controlled state Legislatures, statewide elections over the years have not been reliably blue.
Maine voters haven’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since George Mitchell left office 20 years ago (although current U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, does caucus with the Democrats). Mainers have only elected one Democrat to the Blaine House since 1987, a 28-year stretch in which two Republicans and an independent — the aforementioned King — claimed six of the eight terms.
So while relatively few Mainers regularly attend worship services, that lack of traditional religious participation doesn’t have the same effect on their voting habits as it seems to in many other states.
