The folks at Gallup headlined yesterday’s survey on political preference by race/ethnicity and religion, “Republicans Remain Disproportionately White and Religious.” They might have headlined it, “Democrats Remain Disproportionately Non-white and Not So Religious”–but that would have been wrong. Sixty-two percent of Democrats are non-Hispanic whites, which is very close to the 2009 Census Department estimate of 65 percent. By contrast, the number for Republicans is 89 percent. As for religiosity, while it’s not clear to me what Gallup’s criteria are for distinguishing “highly religious” from “less religious,” I’m willing to bet a hefty sum that with 21 percent of their number African-American and 11 percent Hispanic, the Democrats as a whole are religiously about average for the population at large, whatever criteria are used.

Of course, it’s not exactly news that the GOP consists disproportionately of highly religious white people. What’s noteworthy is how much closer to the Democrats than Republicans the Independents are–ethno-racially and religiously. Seventy-one percent of Independents are non-Hispanic whites (twice as far from the GOP as from the Dems). And among non-Hispanic white Independents, the ratio of highly religious to less religious is just below the slightly-more-than 1:2 Democratic ratio and a far cry from the better than 1:1 GOP ratio. Indeed, white Independents are religiously virtually identical to Moderate Democrats, but significantly less religious than Moderate/Liberal Republicans.

Remember the “moral values” election of 2004? The political point here is that, to the extent that the old religious issues play a role in current electoral politics, the GOP has an uphill battle on its hands. Of all six Gallup partisan groupings, from Liberal Democrat through Conservative Republican, only the last counts more highly religious than less religious whites, and by the hefty 12-point margin (50-38). So if the Tea Party/GOP, even in its latest Beckian incarnation, isn’t stressing same-sex marriage or abortion or any other specific faith-based issue, you can understand why.