This article appears in the February 2007 issue
of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly
print edition, click here.
During the closing weeks of the 2006 election, the mainstream media
expected Democrats to win a larger share of the evangelical
Christian vote than they did in 2004. Pundits credited aggressive
Democratic entreaties on issues such as global warming and poverty
with the putative surge in evangelicals who are willing to rethink
their allegiance with the GOP. A late October Newsweek
poll indicated only 60 percent of white evangelicals, “the
cornerstone of the Republican base,” would support the Republican
candidate in their district.
Stories about Democratic Party outreach to evangelical
Christians were omnipresent in the media. Amy Sullivan authored a
cover story for the May 29 edition of the New Republic
with the juicy subtitle, “The Christian Right Moves Left.” Steve
Waldman, editor of the nonpartisan webzine Beliefnet,
argued in Slate that the religious left “is fruitful and
has multiplied.”
Religious left voter mobilization groups—think MoveOn.org at
prayer—distributed hundreds of thousands of flyers in states like
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia during the election, and had no
trouble drumming up media coverage while they were at it. Their
flyers dismissed the “narrow agenda” of the religious right
(abortion, gay marriage) and advocated a “broader” definition of
“moral values.” Serious Democratic candidates broke their radio
silence and began to advertise on Christian stations this cycle, an
underrated campaign weapon Republicans have leveraged for
years.
As you might expect, the media were almost unable to contain
their glee upon seeing the Democrats win both houses of Congress,
and with the help of some religious voters, to boot. Even before
the last polls closed ABC News ran a story online under the
headline, “Losing Faith in the GOP.” “Narrowing ‘God gap’ raises
eyebrows” sang another headline. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had
come to pass.
Or had it?
A second, calmer look at last November’s results tells a
different story. Evangelical Christians voted Republican in huge
numbers again this cycle. And Democrats’ biggest gains came from
non-Christians and secular voters. Moreover, while it is true that
a significant portion of regular churchgoing Christians shifted
their support toward the Democrats this election cycle, it appears
they did so because the Democrats—not religious voters
themselves—changed their ways. “Those issues didn’t matter,” says
Steve Waldman, speaking about poverty and global warming. Instead,
Waldman believes many Democrats now “get it” with respect to the
role traditional moral values play in elections.
Seventy-two percent of white evangelical Protestants voted for
Republican candidates for Congress and 27 percent voted for
Democratic candidates in 2006. In 2004 those numbers were 75
percent and 24 percent, respectively. In short, despite a slight
swing in favor of Democrats, the GOP’s political base held. In
fact, it held even in the important races. According to the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life, evangelicals “gave strong
support—about two-thirds or more—to Republican Senate candidates
in several key states, including Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Missouri, and Virginia. In Missouri, for example, incumbent
Republican Sen. Jim Talent earned the same share of the white
evangelical vote (74 percent) in his loss as Sen. Kit Bond did in
his 2004 re-election victory.
White mainline Protestants and white Catholics who attend church
at least once a week gave majorities of their support to Republican
candidates. While GOP margins were down among these groups compared
to the 2004 election, they were in line with GOP margins of support
in 2000 and 2002, years in which the Republicans maintained and
even strengthened their majorities on Capitol Hill. American
churchgoers of all Christian denominations remain a reliable
Republican voting bloc.
“The exit polls clearly show that the Democrats’ gains in 2006
came largely among non-Christian and secular voters,” reads a
report from Pew titled, “Religion and the 2006 Elections.” Indeed,
Democrats saw their biggest gains among the 15 percent of the
electorate that never attends church and the 25 percent who attend
church “a few times a year.” Democrats saw double-digit gains in
both these groups over their performance in 2002. Jews swung in
favor of Democrats by a whopping 25 percent over the same
period.
Some Roman Catholic independents swung to the Democrats but as
Pew points out, those that swung had a greater likelihood to skip
Mass. White Catholics who attend Mass weekly voted in favor of
Republicans by a margin of 52 percent to 47 percent.
Because the GOP base held and less religiously committed voters,
secularists, and non-Christians swung so heavily in favor of
Democratic candidates, the “God gap” has actually widened over the
past two years, not narrowed. It remains the case, as was true in
2004, that one of the most reliable predictors of a voter’s
behavior on Election Day is his behavior on Sunday morning.
Unfortunately for Republicans, that means that if a voter’s Sunday
morning routine involves listening to George Stephanopoulos rather
than Father John or Pastor Bob, he is increasingly more likely to
vote Democrat.
Is there a connection between Democratic outreach efforts to
white evangelicals and the boost given them by non-Christian and
less religiously committed voters? Possibly. As paradoxical as that
may sound, consider the GOP’s saga with black voters. For over a
decade, Republicans have aggressively reached out to blacks,
attending NAACP conventions, posing in photo-ops with black church
leaders, and so forth. But for a slight bump in black voter support
for Bush in 2004 (which may have been a historical anomaly), they
have almost nothing to show for it. But here’s the thinly veiled
secret: These publicized outreach efforts were never intended to
win black votes. Instead, they were designed to answer doubts among
white moderate suburbanites about the GOP’s commitment to fairness
and racial justice.
A similar dynamic may be at play with the Democrats’ new faith
push. A pre-election poll by Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg
and James Carville showed that the number one doubt most Americans
had about voting for the Democratic candidate in their district was
that the candidate was “for abortion and gay marriage.” As
Beliefnet’s Waldman said to me, “There has been a sense
that Democrats have been so beyond the pale on [values] issues that
there was this obstacle to get many people to even consider voting
for Democrats.” But, he points out, by making such a public display
of their newfound desire to work with Americans of faith, Democrats
may have assuaged some of those concerns among less religiously
committed voters.
And it didn’t hurt that the Democrats actually allowed some of
their culturally conservative candidates to flower this election
cycle. It wasn’t just extravagant speeches at mega-churches that
helped Democrats overcome voters’ doubts. More than a few
successful Democratic candidates expressed right-of-center views on
cultural issues on the campaign trail: Bob Casey in Pennsylvania,
Heath Shuler in North Carolina, Bill Ritter in Colorado.
In an interview conducted before he won the Democratic primary
for governor, Ritter stated his position on abortion: “I am
pro-life as a matter of personal faith. If Roe v. Wade is
overturned, and the decision of whether or not to legalize
abortions reverts to the states, and if the Colorado legislature
passes a bill banning abortion, I will sign the bill only if it
provides protections for women who are victims of rape or incest,
or to protect the life of the mother.” Right down to the
life of the mother, Ritter’s is the cut-and-paste
Republican position. It is unlikely he would have had much of a
career under previous recent Democratic Party special interest
regimes.
So what role should faith in public life have in the GOP’s
comeback plans, if any at all? The amateurish response would be to
build some distance between the Republican Party and religious
conservatives in the hopes of winning back some non-religious
voters. This would be a terrible mistake and would cost the GOP
some important elements of its base. What is more, all the data
suggests important subgroups of voters—religious or not—swung to
the Democrats over issues such as the Iraq war and congressional
corruption, not “religious right overreach” as an American
correspondent for the Economist recently suggested. It
stands to reason, therefore, that the GOP should move beyond its
solid base of evangelical support by altering its appeal on those
two issues. The GOP’s relationship with Americans of faith may be
its last remaining strength.
