The Faith Community's Preferred Republican Candidates for 2012
Presently, there is much speculation as to which Republicans will run for president in the 2012 election. The Barna Group, a private, non-partisan, for-profit organization recently released a report based on a survey conducted February 10 through February 18, 2011, to see how potential Republican candidates resonate among people of faith. The broad classifications of groups within the faith community that participated included born again Christians, evangelicals (these meet the criteria of a born again Christian, but evangelicals are more conservative and are more involved in religious activity), Catholics, and non-Christians.
According to the study results, among evangelical Christians, the favorites were Huckabee (88% favorable, 11% unfavorable), Palin (79% favorable, 21% unfavorable), Gingrich (57%-37%), Romney (56%-29%), and Ron Paul (51%-26%). All of these potential candidates were clearly favored by evangelicals more so than President Obama (6% favorable, 94% unfavorable).
In the larger Christian circle, the less conservative group referred to as born again Christians, the favorites were Huckabee (58% favorable, 27% unfavorable), Romney (49% favorable, 33% unfavorable), Palin (53%-45%), Gingrich (43%-47%), and Paul (39%-31%).
According to the study, the Catholics’ views of the potential candidates differed from those of Protestants. For instance, while most Catholics had a positive view of President Obama (54% favorable, 45% unfavorable), most Protestants did not (44% favorable, 55% unfavorable).
Generally, those in the non-Christian faith community liked President Obama. Rating, 61% positive, 38% negative. By contrast, among this faith community, all potential Republican candidates had a higher negative favorability rating than positive.
When survey respondents were asked to choose their preferred Republican nominee from a list of 11 possible candidates, only five of those candidates received at least 4% of the positive responses (Romney, Palin, Huckabee, Paul, and Gingrich, in that descending order). The largest number of positive responses went to “none of the above.” Most of those came from registered Democrats among the respondents.
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