It isn't often that Alabama gets to be in the vanguard of the Democratic Party, much less light the path for its resurgence.
Much has been written about the need for a cohesive message, the need to more aggressively counter Republican talking points, etc. But very little is suggested about how that time-honored political tradition - harvesting votes around the edges of your opponent's base - can be put to use today.
Evangelicals are ripe for the picking as this article in Washington Monthly, "When Would Jesus Bolt?" skillfully points out.
The holy skirmish down in Alabama, with its "GOP blocks votes on Bible class bill" headlines, may seem like just a one-time, up-is-down, oddity. But it's really the frontline of a larger war to keep Democrats from appealing to more moderate evangelical voters. American politics is so closely divided that if a political party peels off a few percentage points of a single big constituency, it can change the entire electoral map. To take the most recent example, African Americans, who represent 11 percent of the electorate, cast 88 percent of their ballots for Democrats nationally. But Bush was able to get those numbers down to 84 percent in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2004--and kept the White House as a result. Republican strategists recognized that a significant number of black voters are very conservative on social issues but have stayed with the Democratic Party because of its reputation for being friendlier to racial minorities. The GOP didn't need a strategy to sway the entire black community; it just needed to pick off enough votes to put the party over the top.
Democrats could similarly poach a decisive percentage of the GOP's evangelical base. In the last election, evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted for Bush. That sounds like a fairly inviolate bloc. And, indeed, the conservative evangelicals for whom abortion and gay marriage are the deciding issues are unlikely to ever leave the Republican Party. But a substantial minority of evangelical voters--41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron--are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it's in a Catholic, "seamless garment of life" kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image. A targeted effort by the Democratic Party to appeal to them could produce victories in the short term: To win the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry needed just 59,300 additional votes in Ohio--that's four percent of the total evangelical vote in the state, or approximately 10 percent of Ohio's moderate evangelical voters. And if the Democratic Party changed its reputation on religion, the result could alter the electoral map in a more significant and permanent way.
That's why, insiders say, the word has gone forth from the Republican National Committee to defeat Democratic efforts to reclaim religion. Republicans who disregard the instructions and express support for Democratic efforts are swiftly disciplined. At the University of Alabama, the president of the College Republicans was forced to resign after she endorsed the Bible legislation. A few states away, a Missouri Republican who sponsored a Bible literacy bill came under criticism from conservatives for consulting with Brinson and subsequently denied to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter that he had ever even heard of Brinson. But as for Brinson himself, he's already gone. "Oh, they're ticked at me," he says. "But it's because they're scared. This has the potential to break the Republican coalition."
It is important to understand exactly who makes up the evangelical vote. The fringe elements get all the attention and generally color the view of Democrats toward the entire bloc. But much of the evangelical base is your basic soccer mom/NASCAR dad who votes Republican because they have bought the superior Republican PR campaign that the GOP is the pro-family, faith-friendly, strong defense party.
But one recent event in Alabama has widened a crack that has been forming for a while in that dam.
It is House Bill 58, introduced by Alabama House Majority Leader Ken Guin and Speaker Seth Hammett, both Democrats. HB 58 would allow public schools to offer a course in Bible literacy, specifically a course of study called The Bible and Its Influence, published by The Bible Literacy Project. As the Washington Monthly article points out, the course:
presents the Bible in a historical and cultural context--giving students a better understanding of biblical allusions in art, literature, and music. More importantly, it has been vetted by conservative and liberal legal experts to withstand constitutional challenge.
Except that Republicans have blocked the bill in the House. That's right - Alabama Republicans rallied to prevent public school children from being taught about the Bible.
The Eagle Forum of Alabama's opposition was reduced to an argument that proper procedures were not being followed:
bypassing local and state board approval for public school curriculum, the absence of a proper review for the specified textbook, and legislating use of a vendor's product.
And then there is the argument that the course is really a wolf in sheep's clothing:
the BLP textbook does nothing to advance Bible literacy; rather, it immunizes children against Bible truth by training them to view it from a worldly perspective.
The real reason, of course, is politics:
Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, accused Democrats of offering the bill so Republicans would be on record as opposing Bible education in schools, a charge that Democrats denied.
And here is where the cultivating of evangelical votes becomes possible. Evangelicals know when they are being taken for a ride. Granted, most of them will go along for the ride anyway, grumbling from the back seat. But if a small bloc of them decide they've been down that road before - it only take a few percent of the 26 percent of the electorate that calls itself evangelical and voted 3 to 1 for Bush in 2004 - it would change everything in American electoral politics.
So, how is this accomplished? Good question. It certainly won't happen overnight. Established voting patterns are not easily altered.
To some degree, we only have to stand by while Republicans continue to alienate their base. And certainly Democrats would be laughed at if they suddenly advocated Christmas nativity scenes on the front lawn of every city hall in America - just as phony Republican efforts to win African-American votes are viewed with derision and contempt.
But the one thing that Democrats can do is end the outright hostility that is often expressed toward evangelicals. It's hard to persuade someone to vote for your side when your side treats him like the enemy.
Let's put aside our stubbornness and try to find the common ground. It exists.