Perhaps the most reassuring message coming out of South Carolina’s Republican Primary on Saturday is that presidential contender Mike Huckabee’s loss to John McCain puts a final, symbolic nail in the coffin of what has been called “the religious right.”
Even in a state loaded with self-described evangelical and “born-again” Christians (60% of GOP voters), former Baptist minister Huckabee — who pandered shamelessly to that group with overt calls for a wedding of religion and politics — managed to attract only 30% of the GOP primary vote, compared with McCain’s 33%. The other 37%, of course, went to other candidates.
The exit-polling data tell an even more interesting tale. Huckabee won only 40% of self-described evangelicals; 60% supported other candidates (McCain won 27% of them). Most interesting, though, is the following fact: Among the 40% of the GOP voters who were non-evangelicals, Huckabee came in fourth, attracting only a piddling 12% support.
In short, not only was Huckabee unable to sell his toxic brew of religion and populism beyond his core evangelical base, even a majority of them weren’t swallowing it. Moreover, here was how the Republican primary voters (again, mostly evangelicals) ranked the issues most important to them:
Economy: 40%
Illegal immigration: 26%
Iraq: 16%
Terrorism: 15%
Note that “social values” issues like abortion do not even appear on this list of top concerns. This demonstrates a set of rather “worldly” priorities, even among those on the “religious right.”
The moral:
Those who worry about the emerging (let alone imminent) threat of a right-wing “theocracy” arising from the Republican Party are smoking funny stuff. There is NO constituency for a wedding of Church and State in America, not even in the Bible Belt. To the contrary, ALL the Republican candidates, save one, have been competing for GOP voters with speeches and position papers filled with the rhetoric of limited government, pro-free-markets, tax-and-spending cuts, and fewer regulations on our individual lives.
The exception, Mike Huckabee, was the only Republican trying to peddle an interventionist program of economic populism and religious involvement in law and politics — and now his campaign has been stopped dead in its tracks…by evangelical Christian conservatives.
Future Republican candidates will note the abortive campaigns of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and now Mike Huckabee, and realize that pandering to social conservatives is a road to national electoral defeat. America is filled with religious people; but they are an individualistic lot who want their politics to remain safely secular.
UPDATE, 1/21/08 — Very wise analysis of the failure of the Fred Thompson campaign by Bob Krumm. A number of the issues (though certainly not all) have to do with Thompson’s failure to apply tried-and-true principles of marketing to the delivery of his message. So, what Krumm has to say on that score has important implications for advocates generally, operating in contexts other than just political campaigns.
Reprinted by permission of Robert Bidinotto, publisher of The BIDINOTTO BLOG (http://bidinotto.journalspace
