Re: Two Americas and Presidential Politics

Deal asks: “How do you see the ‘two Americas’ idea playing out among the GOP hopefuls?”

Answering this question is not as easy as answering the same question of Democrats. Democrats still have a relatively secular political base. There are few black churches in Iowa and none in New Hampshire. Outreach to churchgoers is still largely a General Election exercise for the Democrats.

The GOP base, on the other hand, still consists largely of churchgoing folk; mostly of the evangelical stripe, but many millions of Catholics, as well.

However, as we saw in 2000 evangelicals do not vote in a cluster.  Gary Bauer was supposed to be the candidate of the evangelical wing of the Republican Party. Steve Forbes reached out aggressively to social conservatives. Even Pat Buchanan and Bob Smith (before they bolted from the Republican Party) earned some support from churchgoers. Nevertheless, then-Gov. George W. Bush probably won a plurality of evangelical Christian support in the “pre-primary” primary—and he certainly won a majority of evangelicals in the South Carolina 

primary.

Likewise, every major Republican candidate for president will have an aggressive outreach campaign to evangelicals in 2008. I suspect their will be a great deal of splintering of this important bloc in the primaries, but a great deal of cohesion in the General Election (especially if Sen. Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee).

But what of right-leaning Catholics? That is the question we should be asking. Catholics as a whole—and even churchgoing Catholics—reversed their slow, skeptical march toward the GOP during the 2006 election; choosing instead to give the Democrats another chance. They did so, I believe, because of issues such as corruption, economic fairness, and, it must be said, the Iraq War.

The question then becomes: Which prospective GOP presidential candidate can tap into that Catholics discontent with the GOP in Catholic-heavy, early primary states in which non-Republicans can vote in the Republican primary.  These states are New Hampshire and Michigan. I don’t know the answer. But the smart money is on the first and most appealing candidate even to try.

Patrick Hynes