Dem Efforts at Recruiting Evangelicals Will Likely Fail

Just as Republican efforts at recruiting black voters has largely failed (Dems still get about 90% of black votes), so too will the Dems fail in their efforts to attract evangelicals. So says Peter Brown in an article on RealClearPolitics.com:

White evangelicals were 23 percent of the electorate in 2004 and they gave President Bush 78 percent of their votes. High turnout among conservative Christians was a major factor in Bush carrying key swing states like Ohio and Florida.

Since then, Democrats/liberals have been trying to figure out how to attract more white evangelical voters. Now that we are now in the middle of the political season - not just because of the approaching off-year elections, but the run-up to the 2008 voting - we seem to be inundated with books about evangelicals and politics.

Most of these books come from the Northeast, where evangelicals are considered a species to be studied, rather than the folks who stand in line with you at the supermarket.

Perhaps the best of the bunch comes from Mark Pinsky, the Orlando Sentinel's religion writer, whose book, A Jew among the Evangelicals, A Guide for the Perplexed" is meant as an explainer to northern liberals.

Pinsky, himself a northeasterner by birth, is a friend and former colleague who has spent a decade covering evangelicals in the South. He makes the point that generational change is coming in the evangelical community as new, less dogmatic leaders replace the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons.

He notes that John Green, a well-respected University of Akron political scientist and pollster, had found that on a number of environmental issues evangelicals agree more with the consensus Democratic position than the Republican one. A poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press found that evangelicals strongly support stem-cell research funding, the opposite position held by President Bush.

Yet, the idea that these differences with Republican orthodoxy make evangelical Christians likely to change their voting allegiance is as flawed as the notion that just because millions of black voters oppose abortion they will vote Republican.

Voters, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion, make their political choices based on their overall comfort level with the views and values of a candidate.

Blacks, as a group, favor larger government programs, social safety nets and economic polices that value larger government spending over tax cuts. That is why they vote Democratic.

Evangelical Christians favor traditional social values, tend to be skeptical of government and fond of the military. That is why they vote Republican.

The idea that voting behavior will change because younger evangelical leaders are softer-spoken and less tied to the Republican infrastructure than their predecessors, or because evangelicals are worried about the environment, sure looks like wishful thinking.

Granted, a handful of evangelical leaders jumped on the environmental bandwagon awhile ago, but that single issue certainly isn't going to drive family values voters (who make up a large part of the evangelical vote) toward a party that is anything but family friendly. I think it's pretty safe to say that most Christians are not going to be attracted to the Ned Lamont/Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid Democrats, nor would they want to affiliate themselves with the vile and coarse nutroots that support them.

In order to support Democrats, an evangelical has to be willing to accept a pro-abortion/pro-gay marriage party, regardless of any other political positions the Dems might have, and both of issues create significant discomfort for evangelicals.

Like blacks who continue to believe in large numbers that government is the answer to their problems and therefore continue to support the party of large government, evangelicals hold some core beliefs that simply cannot be reconciled with Democrat party principles and therefore prevent any large movement away from the Republican party. What is more likely to happen is that evangelicals, upset with the direction of the party, won't switch but will simply stay home on election day.