Unbelieveable?

There's an interesting post from UK Polling Report, talking about the factors that might cause people to change their mind about a political candidate, if discovered. The results are interesting, and the post goes through them in a bit more detail, but the one that stands out to me is the one concerning atheism.

While in the UK only 20% would refuse to vote for an atheist, similar to the numbers for a gay or Muslim candidate, in the US the number was 53%. Note the question:

If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be an atheist, would you vote for that person?

So 53% of the American electorate would refuse to vote for a member of their own party who happened to be an atheist. That is, given the binary presidential situation in the US, they would consider someone whose views they broadly agreed with (except, presumably, on religion) to be unsuitable for office, and would either actively help, or passively allow, someone with opposing political views to get into office instead.

Clearly, there is the possibility that some people may have answered a question that was not asked (Would you like an atheist to be president), instead of considering the exact phrasing of the query, but if we assume that this is not a large number (since otherwise the survey results are obviously useless), this means that 53% of the electorate would put the issue of their candidate's personal view on religion above all other issues. They might agree with their candidate on the economy, on immigration, on healthcare, on education, on Iraq, on oil, on the environment, on everything but whether God exists or not, and that would be enough for them to prefer someone who disagrees with them on all those matters to become president.

Perhaps in reality people would react differently - 38% of conservatives said they wouldn't vote for someone who was 72 years old, but McCain doesn't seem to have dropped that much of the Republican vote, suggesting that some of those could be won round by other factors. Also there is no allowance for the opponent's views, which could affect voters, or the existance of third candidates (which would seem to become more important if one of the major parties fielded a candidate with one of these "problem" characteristics).

Overall, the results pretty much exclude an 'out-of-the-closet' atheist candidate from openly appearing in any electoral race, simply because they will not be able to guarantee enough votes from their base to get official backing. They'll never get the votes because there is a large backdrop of prejudice against them across the board, and so they'd get no significant financial backing or public endorsements.

Looking at the historical data that's also linked, running as an atheist candidate today would be roughly equivalent to running as a woman in 1945, or as an African-American in 1958, both of which would be candidates running so much against ingrained prejudice as to have no chance of winning.

I'd encourage people to glance through the other results in those posts, too - there's lots of interesting data there on other demographics and historical comparisons.

So, would you vote for an atheist? And if not, why not?