How Obama Lost the Election For Hillary

The general wisdom is that Al Gore lost the 2000 election because of President Clinton's antipathy towards guns swung Gore's home state of Tennessee to vote for Bush. If Gore had won Tennessee then he wouldn't have needed Florida. Because of that, Democrats backed off from anti-gun platforms until the party swung hard left under Obama. Even then, both Obama and Hillary Clinton insisted in 2008 that they would not be anti-gun.

I'm sure that gun rights had an effect on the 2016 election but I don't think it was as decisive as in 2000. I think that religion was the dividing line in 2016.

The Obama administration and the Democrats in general came out as pretty much anti-religion. In 2008 Obama insisted that he was against gay marriage. By the end of his administration, the party was not only cheering the legality of gay marriage, but attacking anyone who still objected. Even people providing individual services while same-sex marriage was still officially illegal were put out of business by the government in the name of tolerance.

While this is still being debated in the state and national supreme courts, another issue has already been judged - Obamacare's birth control provisions.

When it was first proposed, the Obama administration was reluctant to give any form of religious waiver. After being shamed into it, they allowed for some sort of waiver but they insisted that it be applied as narrowly as possible. Two cases made it to the Supreme Court. One involved Hobby Lobby which always included birth control but did not include 3 of the 15 types mandated by the government. The owners of Hobby Lobby felt that the remaining three were too close to abortion. It would have been simple for the government to grant waivers on religious grounds but they insisted on fighting it all the way to the SCOTUS - where they lost.

The government took an even harder line with Little Sisters of the Poor. They took them all the way to the SCOTUS, too. If they had won then they were prepared to put the Little Sisters out of business. They lost that one, too. But think about it - they were taking such a hard line that they were willing to put a religious charitable organization out of business over birth control.

These cases sent out a message - that the left has its own priorities and considers religion as an impediment to their agenda. To them, religious objections are nothing but and excuse for bigotry.

One question that the Democrats kept asking was why Evangelicals and Catholics voted for someone who had been divorced and had multiple affairs. The answer is obvious and they said so at the time - they were worried about their survival under more years of Democrat rule.

How important was this to the election? It's hard to say but look at these maps. This is the states that Hillary won:

And this ranks states by how religious they are:

Hillary mainly won the least religious states.

Maybe the Democrats need to rethink their attitudes on religion.