The Obama effect

MPR's Tim Nelson sends along this dispatch:

If you needed any further indication just how topsy-turvy this election season has become, you should have been at the recent "Obama Effect" conference at the University of Minnesota. Some of it was mind-crushing graduate school speak, but there were some moments of disorienting intrigue.

At one point, University of Minnesota alum Penny Sheets, now at the University of Washington (and who may or may not also be a backup singer for Seattle auteur rocker Anomie Belle) rolled out preliminary analysis of a web survey being run at Harvard.

The point of the survey is to try and tease out what voters might really be thinking as they make choices about the presidential election, particularly regarding race, religion and patriotism. Sheets suggested that voters were mulling the Christianity and Americanism of candidates as they stepped into the polling booth, regardless of what they

Sheets's Powerpoint presentation was a little complex and she only had 20 minutes, so she had to kind of rush through it. There were lots of caveats, too, like the fact that the Harvard survey was very "Democrat heavy." But she ended up with this observation about the hundreds of people who have taken the Project Implicit test at Harvard.

"There's some interaction, we think between religiosity and party that I wasn't able to get to yet. But we're hoping to do that in a next step. It looks like the more religious Republicans tend to vote for Obama, and the more religious Democrats tend to vote for McCain."

Go figure. It is, however, an interesting parallel to the wavering fortunes of Christian voters that the Barna Group was talking about last week.

You can test your own political, regiligous and party mettle at the Harvard Project Implicit website here.

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