The contribution of the faithful

While reading through a few articles on the internet I stubled across two that I thought were both interesting and related to each other in a certain way. The first is an article from commonweal and it talks about faith and politics in general over the years, it is quite interesting and brings up some really good points. The one question that I had after reading this article was what is it that we will contribute, as society, that will make this upcoming presidential election so much different than elections in the past?
I then went on to read another article that, I think, gave an answer (only on of many answers, I'm sure). This article was from TIME and it focused on the Democratic party and the involvement that faith, especially prayer, has played in this election so far. I thought it was really interesting to see that in the past the Democrats have not been overly expressive of their faith yet, they attracted a good majority of the Catholic vote in both our parents' and grandparents' generations. I wonder if this increase in faith in the Democratic party will attract even more of the faithful...