Because the party stripped Michigan of its delegates, the Democrats spent practically no energy on the Michigan primary. Still, the news networks polled the Democratic voters who did turn out, and the battery of questions was far more skewed than New Hampshire and Iowa polls. Those results have been the subject of extensive analysis already, and voters and the public deserve to know how religion correlated with other factors in voting patterns for both parties.

But we can't, because while the Republican exit polls featured 11 data sets about voters' religion, the Democratic polls had zero.

Sure, the Democratic vote was modest, but the network consortium did take the trouble to poll them, so there's no excuse for entirely excluding religion from the questionnaires. (And I for one would like to know if religious voters skewed toward Clinton or uncommitted, given the role religion has played in public perceptions of her.)

The flaws are myriad. Ignoring Democrats' religion perpetuates the old bromide that faith is a factor in Republican races only, that "values voters" and evangelicals are exclusively a GOP bloc. It disregards the increasing independence of evangelicals and other religious groups. It fails to assess the effectiveness of the now-bipartisan faith outreach strategies, which is a well known political development.

One defense of the persistent exclusion of evangelical and other religious questions from Democratic exit polls is that the results would likely be insignificant. However, such concerns don't stop pollsters from recording and publishing Republican voters' race, even though the primary voters are so white that no other race's candidate preferences yields statistically significant data. Just as that is a noteworthy fact about Republican voters, it would be useful to know if evangelical and other religious voters' Democratic turnout were just as miniscule (which it is certainly not). We can't get an accurate story if we don't bother to collect the facts. Conscientious reporters, informed citizens, and politicos are all missing out on the changing role of faith in politics.