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Username: Tonya
Post Number: 426
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, August 24, 2006 - 07:38 pm: | 
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Posted on Tue, Aug. 22, 2006
Democrats unlikely to win evangelicals
BY PETER A. BROWN
One of the hardy perennials of politics is the Republican Party effort to recruit black voters each election, because the GOP believes there is a new generation of African-American voters who might be ready to shed their Democratic allegiance.
Despite GOP leaders' best efforts to attract African-American voters, Democrats still get almost 90 percent of the black vote.
That is worth considering as we are deluged with political efforts by liberals and their academic supporters offering books about how large numbers of evangelical Christians, who have become the most reliable GOP voters, might be ripe for the picking by Democrats.
Mark me down as skeptical. My reasons are very similar to why the Republicans can't make much progress among black voters:
Even though it goes against our national vision of a country of individuals unbound by class or culture, the truth is that demographics still control political destiny to a large degree.
Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic because of history and perceived self- interest.
Democrats are the party of government, and it was the government -- spurred by the civil rights movement, not the private sector -- that was responsible for the advances that have improved the lives and well-being of African-Americans.
The growing black middle class, which includes many fervent churchgoers, may have a lifestyle more open to the Republican philosophy of less government and family values.
But that hasn't changed their voting behavior, and few in the politics business think that will change anytime soon, if ever.
The same is likely the case for white evangelicals.
White evangelicals were 23 percent of the electorate in 2004, and they gave President Bush 78 percent of their votes. Since then, Democrats/liberals have been trying to figure out how to attract more white evangelical voters.
Mark I. Pinsky notes in his book "A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed" 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 the president.
Yet 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. And 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.
Peter A. Brown is the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Connecticut.
© 2006 Wichita Eagle and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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