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It used to be clear. Conservative (mostly white) Christians voted Republican. Fallwellian conservatives knew their party – the politically hawk-like, anti-abortion, anti gay marriage and anti gay rights, states-rights Republicans. According to the Washington Post, when referring to the Bush election in 2004
... the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement's leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon…
According to surveys of voters leaving the polls, Bush won 79 percent of the 26.5 million evangelical votes and 52 percent of the 31 million Catholic votes.
Times have changed. There is a confluence of events that now make the conservative Christian the biggest wildcard group in the upcoming election.
MSNBC describes today’s reality regarding how Republicans are viewed.
The number of conservative Christians with a favorable view of the party has plummeted from 74 percent to 54 percent between 2004 and this year, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Evangelicals comprise more than one-third of GOP voters.
And that is why leaders in the conservative Christian community will be gathering for a "values Voters" Summit in DC this weekend. Watch that phrase. You'll be hearing a lot of it.
Here is some of what has changed, causing the scramble in the ranks of the conservatives.
1. The Republicans have no one candidate that is anti-gay rights/marriage, and totally anti-abortion.
2. The issues among evangelicals have expanded to include a growing opposition to the war in Iraq, causing some uneasy but inevitable alliances with the political left.
3. The state of the economy is causing as much pain for evangelicals as anyone else..it forecloses on the liberal and the conservative. Conservative boomers are getting anxious about social security.
4. Even former states rights advocates are pushing for national initiatives to establish their values across the nation.
5. Issues such as global warming, world hunger, health care and education are starting to vie for attention within this group with the issues of abortion and gay rights – the two big bell-ringers of the past.
Until a month ago, there was considerable talk that the only solution would be to raise up a third party candidate that embodied conservative Christian values. However, at a recent meeting,
a different picture emerged:
Speaking to reporters at a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor in advance of next week’s Values Voter Summit, Bauer and Perkins backed away from earlier threats that Christian conservatives would consider a third-party bid if a pro-abortion rights candidate wins the GOP nomination. They both agreed that supporting such a bid next year would virtually “guarantee” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) victory.
It is a big vacuum in the conservative movement – and quite coincidentally, while discovering that vacuum, Mitt Romney had a dramatic change of heart about abortion. The former robust advocate for choice found another path
which just so happened to align him with conservatives who are anxious about his Mormonism.
Romney has acknowledged his position on abortion rights has changed since he first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994. Romney in 1994 said, "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country," adding, "I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, we should sustain and support it." Roe is the 1973 Supreme Court case that effectively barred state abortion bans. When he ran for Massachusetts governor in 2002, Romney promised to "preserve the status quo" on abortion rights in the state and oppose any changes to state laws that restricted or increased access to abortion.
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Romney in 2004, while studying human embryonic stem cell research, said he experienced an awakening that led him to believe "the sanctity of life had been cheapened" by the Roe decision (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 7/6). He recently said he wants Roe overturned to allow states to determine their own abortion policies, which he added is preferable to the "one-size-fits-all" federal approach embedded in the decision.
In the midst of all of this, a very damning book about the White House and the conservative evangelical community has been published.
In the book "Tempting Faith, An Inside Story of Political Seduction," author David Kuo, a former