More religion here, less religion there (Score 1)

You could corrolate this to other studies which have shown that by far, more people attend church regularly in the U.S. than they do in Europe. It logically follows IMO that anyone who is devoutly religious in a religion with a creation story would doubt evolution. Even though this has been falling in the U.S., it's still a lot lower in Europe. In some places churches struggle to survive financially because nobody comes to services.

As for politicizing science, yes that definitely goes on, but it's not just on the right. It happens on the left, too. I am troubled by it. What I am even more troubled about is how the very disciplines that are politicized try to deny it. In some cases if people point it out, scientists, of all people, will go on a smear campaign against those who do so. Have we forgotten what science is about? I fear that in some quarters the scientific discipline has been thrown out the window, but its practitioners still call it science, if only because it confers legitimacy to a pet theory.

I am sure that from the time the U.S. government started funding scientific projects there were those who feared that one day it would come to this. Once government gets involved in funding something it's inevitable that politics will enter it into it because government is a "political animal". Yes it has lots of money to fund projects, but there are strings attached. There's no getting away from that.