Recently in Republicans Category

Yesterday, I missed this very helpful graphic from CBS (h/t David Gibson) cross-tabulating support for the GOP wannabes in Iowa by evangelical and Tea Party status:

I underestimated Gingrich's evangelical support by a few points, but what's interesting to note is that all the non-Mormons do better with both TPiers and evangelicals than they do with the totality of likely caucus-goers. Indeed, if there were no TPiers and evangelicals, Mitt Romney would be winning handily, but unfortunately for him 50 percent support the TP and 32 percent are evangelicals. (How many evangelicals are TPiers it doesn't say.)

What are evangelicals doing supporting the likes of Gingrich? NYT's Ross Douthat is dismayed, but not because he thinks conservative Christians have no business taking at face value Newt's public displays of contrition and embrace of the conservative religious agenda. No, it's because, well, what will the liberals think?

His candidacy isn't a test of religious conservatives' willingness to be good, forgiving Christians. It's a test of their ability to see their cause through outsiders' eyes, and to recognize what anointing a thrice-married adulterer as the champion of "family values" would say to the skeptical, the unconverted and above all to the young.

Happily, the new NYT/CBS Iowa poll asked the evangelical/born question. Unhappily, the detailed array doesn't offer crosstabs for preference by religion, and all the story tells us is that evangelicals prefer Gingrich to Romney by a 3-1 margin. Since Gingrich leads Romney overall by a margin of 3-2 (28 percent to 18 percent), it's evident that Romney's share of them is disproportionately small. If 30 percent chose Gingrich--and in a field with significant evangelical support for Bachmann, Perry, and Paul, that seems generous--it would leave only 10 percent favoring Romney.

Altogether, 32 percent of the likely GOP caucus-goers identified themselves as born-again or evangelical. That's down from 39 percent in the NYT/CBS Iowa poll taken at this time four years ago. Then, Romney was leading Mike Huckabee 27 percent to 21 percent. At the caucuses two months later, Huckabee trounced Romney 35 percent to 25 percent because evangelicals turned out in droves, constituting fully 60 percent of all GOP caucus-goers. Huckabee wouldn't have won without them.

This time around, evangelicals seem less interested in going to the caucuses and less likely to find a Huckabee to get behind. But if the candidacy of one of the born-agains is, like Gingrich's, born again, all that could change. NYT/CBS found two-thirds of likely caucus-goers still unsettled in their choices. This one's a long way from over.

The CW tonight is that Rick Perry has stuck the final fork in himself--and who am I to disagree? When you can't even remember--"oops"--the names of the federal agencies you've promised to eliminate, you're a joke even in this Republican field. It was only four months ago that Perry rode out of Austin as the savior of the evangelical old guard. What can they be thinking now?

"We never trusted Huckabee. Palin's out of it. Bachmann's like one of those crazy church ladies who's always in our face. Herman Cain is now beyond unelectable. All that's left besides Romney and the other Mormon are the two Roman Catholics, Altar Boy Santorum and Convert Gingrich--Beltway insiders both. We probably can get our guy--whoever it is--the VP slot. But shee-it, it's tempting to sit this sucker out."

They've stopped behaving like politicians and started acting like, well, professors. Abstract ideas have grabbed them: Public sector unions are bad. A fertilized egg is a person. Illegal immigrants must be shut out of American society. Government regulation only leads to unintended consequences. Voter fraud is a threat to the Republic. Judicial independence also. Government doesn't create jobs.

So Americans believe that the rich should pay more taxes? Ordinary people don't know the facts of economic life. The agenda is to attend to what the people who have the money give out grants to do. The "Koch Foundation" makes an RFP and you apply, take the money, and run for office.

But Citizens United notwithstanding, dollars don't yet go directly into the ballot box. As a result, the GOP pols got their rear ends handed to them yesterday. If they're smart, they'll start behaving like politicians again.

Kos' new poll of Republicans shows a party committed to the equality of women--and some other, less liberal ideas. Probably to the surprise of the pollsters, 76 percent of Republicans think marriages are equal partnerships, as opposed to believing that men are leaders of their households. And 86 percent think women should work outside the home. Sorry, Saudis, no allies there.

On the big culture wars issues of our time, the Republicans are locked in: 76 percent think abortion is murder and 77 percent oppose same-sex marriage. In the stupid question department, 77 percent think public school students should "be taught that the Book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world." Well, I've got no problem with teaching kids what's in the Bible either.

It's interesting that 43 percent of Southern Republicans think that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and that 33 percent of Southern Republicans want their states to secede from the Union. Could it be that those 33 percent want their kids to be like Barack Obama? Nah.

Perhaps of greatest note, Republicans turn out to be a lot more religiously exclusive than Americans generally. Fully two-thirds "believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is through Jesus Christ." By contrast, a Pew poll of a year ago found that two-thirds of all Americans believe that many religions can "lead to eternal life." If Republicans are, say, 25 percent of the population, then upwards of 80 percent of non-Republicans believe that heaven is open to non-Christians. Call it the Pearly Gates gap.

In a post on who gets the vote of "religious conservatives," Steve Waldman writes:

That leaves Huckabee. As a former Baptist minister himself, he has standing to criticize Palin without being cast as anti-Christian. Mainstream media mistakenly assume that Huckabee failed last time because his base was too limited to religious conservatives. Actually, he fared no better among Christians than McCain and Romney early on. He was distrusted by many in the party for being too liberal, not for being too conservative.

This is entirely misconceived. As any examination of the exit polls from last year's GOP primaries will show you, Huckabee did fail because he had trouble drawing beyond his base of white evangelicals. They loved him. The distrust came from so-called leaders of the religious right, whose suspicion arose, at least in substantial part, because they didn't think he could win. His "liberal" moment was over after Iowa. As for faring no better among Christians than McCain and Romney, that's only if you include all Christians--Catholics and and Mainline Protestants and Mormons as well as Evangelicals. Huckabee couldn't win the former, for sure. But Catholics and Mainline Protestants do not constitute the conservative religious base of the GOP. C'mon, Steve!

The big question for GOP big shots at the moment has to be whether Mitt Romney can manage to garner enough rank-and-file evangelical support to marginalize Huckabee. So look for Romney to play a big role in fighting the Proposition 8 repeal referendum. Where has Romney just bought a new home? La Jolla, California.

Update: I don't appear to be the only one with this thought.

Today's Gallup poll on The First Hundred Days suggests that Obama has shrunk his religion gap. Whereas 41 percent of weekly worship attenders and 61 percent of seldom or never attenders supported him just before the election, now the numbers are 69  57 percent and 57 69 percent respectively. Thus the gap between the two groups has narrowed from 20 points to 12 points. Since Obama has improved his numbers markedly with both groups, the best way to understand this is to say that of those who didn't support him six months ago, he has gained 27 percent of the weekly attenders as compared to 21 percent of the seldoms and nevers. What explains the differential?

In my view, it's that Obama has succeeded in calming the fears of religious folks sufficiently to enable a disproportionate number of them to support him for other reasons--mainly economic. (According to yesterday's NYT poll, Americans support his handling of the economy by 55 percent to 24 percent.) He's done this by reaching out to religious conservatives, rolling out pro-choice policies quietly, taking a couple of middle-ground positions (stem cell funding limits, abortion reduction), and putting off some hot button issues such as reversing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In a word, he's so far managed to keep his social liberal base happy without scaring the conservatives.

Which brings us to Sen. Olympia Snowe's lament for the Republican moderates of yesteryear, in the course of which she puts the blame for the GOP's current woes on social conservatism:

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities -- indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, "We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only 'litmus test' of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty." He continued, "As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement."

This analysis works pretty well for New England, where Republicans have not fared well as social conservatives. But it's a pretty poor account of how the GOP prospered in the last decades of the 20th century as well as of what happened to Arlen Specter. It was through enlisting social conservatives in the Republican Party in the South and West that the party achieved its recent ascendency. And it wasn't Specter's pro-choice stance that cost him his party; it was his vote on the stimulus package. The opponent who was kicking his butt in the polls was Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth.

For all the huffing and puffing over abortion, gay marriage, and the like, the party's real problem is its doctrinaire economic world view. Consider the sad case of Mike Huckabee. His initial appeal as a national candidate beyond his social conservative world lay in daring to challenge Republican orthodoxy on immigration and economic policy. He even made so bold as to refer to the Club for Growth as the Club for Greed. And he had his head handed to him by the GOP powers-that-be. Today, he's a chastened, shrunken, party hack version of  his former self. Meanwhile, Obama is sitting pretty, eating the GOP's lunch.

So Southern California moneybags Howard Ahmanson, the Christian Reconstructionist supporter of the Discovery Institute and Proposition 8, has withdrawn the hem of his garment from the Republican Party and joined the Democrats. "The Democratic Party in California," he writes, "is now so big and diverse and all-inclusive that it has ABSOLUTELY NO PRINCIPLES WHATSOEVER." Dismissing the GOP because of its single-minded opposition to taxes, insisting that he has changed none of his opinions, Ahmanson is, like Diogenes, in search of a few like-minded Democrats to support. This strikes me as an exercise in Orange County idiosyncrasy, signifying very little beyond the continuing implosion of California Republicanism.

Michael Steele goes all "individual choice" and states rights on abortion. Not to mention "nature" not "choice" on homosexuality. In GQ.

Update: ...and the walk back.

The sharpest point Matt Bai makes in his NYT Magazine profile today is to note that while Gingrich likes to place himself in the grand tradition of Republican progressives, he lacks their readiness to rethink party doctrine.

And yet, at the same time, Gingrich pointedly declines to do what Roosevelt and La Follette did, which is to directly confront the Republican orthodoxies of their day. Those reformers demanded their fellow Republicans make a choice between ideas and ignorance. By contrast, Gingrich doesn't really challenge any core ideological precept of the Bush era -- only the strategy of "base mobilization" that underlay it...

At a moment when the role of religious fundamentalism in the party is a central question for reformers, Gingrich, rather than making any kind of case for a new enlightenment, has in fact gone to great lengths to placate Christian conservatives.

Underneath the bluster, Newt is still the chubby little myopic nerd who collects reptiles and wants to be loved by his peers. That's why he was so successful at unifying the long-suffering GOP members of the House in the early 1990s, and also, I suspect, why he succumbed so readily to the charms of Bill Clinton.

In 1995, Reaganism was still relatively fresh and Gingrich was Speaker of the House. Can Think Tank Newt lead the GOP out of the much deeper wilderness in which it finds itself today? I doubt it.