But religion did not do so well for Obama during his first term in office. His charm offensive with white evangelicals proved fruitless, while an increasingly Islamophobic Republican right enjoyed some success portraying him as a crypto-Muslim.
Meanwhile, the God Gap gave way to the Rise of the Nones as the religion-and-politics meme of the moment. Between the mid-1990s and 2012, the proportion of Americans who gave their religious identity as “none” grew from the mid-single digits to 20% of the population. Why should Democrats worry about their shortage of religious voters when more and more Americans no longer had a religion?
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