Howard Dean believes Jesus was not just liberal but "probably to the left of the Democratic Party."

In a discussion about the recent "Poverty Summit" on MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee said that he had always wondered why Evangelical Christians didn't vote Democrat because, he argued, Jesus was clearly a leftist. Citing polling from a decade ago, Dean said he learned that the top two issues for older Evangelicals were abortion and gay marriage, while younger Evangelicals considered them to be poverty and climate change, something he seemed to suggest offered Democrats some hope. 

Host Joe Scarborough led into the exchange by quoting Arthur Brooks (who Newsbusters notes was the only conservative on the Poverty Summit panel) as saying, "the reason I became a free market conservative was because what I cared about the most was the poor. And I believe this was the best way to alleviate suffering."

SCARBOROUGH: You see what the President said, you see what Arthur Brooks said, what other people said. Then suddenly E.J. Dionne goes, wait a second, maybe both sides really can work together.

DEAN: They can. Let me share some incredibly interesting polling data we got ten years ago when I was running the DNC. I was wondering why evangelicals didn't vote for Democrats because if you look at the red-letter version of the Bible, Jesus was probably to the left of the Democratic party. So we did polling. And here's what we found. This is ten years ago. Evangelicals over 55 it was all about abortion and gay marriage. Evangelicals under 35 in this country, the number one issue was poverty, the number two issue was climate change.

Nicolle Wallace followed up by asking Dean to clarify whether or not younger Evangelicals supported gay marriage. Dean said they didn't poll for that, but Wallace added that public opinion "has changed" on the issue.

Video, partial transcript via NB.