The Myth of McCain's Weakness Among Evangelicals
WSJ.COM
In Political Perceptions
Steven Waldman is president and editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, and author of Founding Faith. Previously the national editor of U.S. News & World Report, he is a recognized expert on religion, social issues and politics. Click here for Waldman's full bio.
Conventional wisdom holds that John McCain is struggling to win evangelical voters. Evangelical leader Mark DeMoss predicted last week that he'd run weaker than any Republican since 1976, and a front page New York Times piece detailed the evangelical malaise.
Sen. McCain has been criticized by prominent Christian leaders such as James Dobson, who said at one point he might even stay home instead of supporting someone as repulsive as Sen. McCain. They view him as insufficiently conservative and still fume over his comments in 2000 that some religious conservative leaders were "agents of intolerance." In the primaries, most Christian leaders backed Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. More recently, Sen. McCain's decision to jettison two prominent conservative Christians – John Hagee and Rod Parsely – has sent his God-o-Meter ratings plummeting like a stone in a baptismal font.
But is this conventional wisdom really true? Or to be more precise, Sen. McCain clearly has a problem with evangelical leaders — but does he really have a major problem with evangelical voters?
On the contrary, Sen. McCain won the nomination in part because he did far better than expected with rank-and-file evangelicals.
Not Too Shabby
For instance, in New Hampshire, among the 21% of the Republican electorate that was evangelical or "born again," Sen. McCain won 29%, Mr. Romney 28% and Mr. Huckabee 27% — even though Mr. Huckabee is a former evangelical preacher and Mr. Romney had the endorsements of many key Christian leaders.
In Texas, where half the primary voters described themselves as evangelical, Sen. McCain won 44% of them, while Mr. Huckabee got 48%. And in Florida, the decisive state that clinched the nomination for Sen. McCain, he once again played to a tie among evangelicals (Mr. Huckabee 31%, Mr. Romney 31%, Sen. McCain 28%.) Not too shabby for someone supposedly viewed as just one step above Sen. Lucifer. |
