THE PRESENT-DAY THROWBACK REFUSES TO DIE

You probably know that GOP voters in Alabama and Mississippi love their Jesus:

White born-again and evangelical Christians were dominating Alabama's and Mississippi's Republican presidential primaries on Tuesday....

Around 8 in 10 Mississippians participating in Tuesday's contest were white evangelical or born-again Christians.... Those same voters accounted for nearly three-quarters of those surveyed in Alabama....

What I find striking is that it appears the voters pools in Mississippi was more born-again and evangelical than four years ago, and in Alabama the percentages were approximately the same:

in Alabama and Mississippi ... evangelicals accounted for 77 and 69 percent of voters in the 2008 GOP primaries ...

And as for ideology, at least in Mississippi:

More than four in 10 voters in Mississippi call themselves "very conservative" in early exit polls, up significantly from 2008. About seven in 10 overall are conservative, also higher than four years ago.


I know -- these are just two states, and we're talking about the voter pool of just one party within those states. But aren't these folks supposed to be fading away? Isn't the Grim Demographic Reaper supposed to be ushering this kind of voter to the Great Polling Place in the Sky? Isn't the point that this kind of voter is being replaced by younger Republicans whose megachurches aren't ideological, and where the young people watch Glee and think gay people are kind of OK?

So when does the future start?

I know, I know. Maybe the available choices (especially Santorum) affected the proportions of evangelicals (remember, by this time in '08, Huckabee and Thompson were out of the race by the time it got to these states).

But really, when do we start getting the new America we've been promised for years? When does the country start changing? How do we know we're not just breeding a whole new generation of angry, tribal white people?