Sen. Ted Cruz’s transparent bid to secure the Republican
Party’s evangelical vote right out of the gate – delivering a televangelist-style
presidential announcement speech last week at a religious school, Liberty
University — is sure to inspire efforts by other presidential wannabes to
prevent the Texas senator from gaining the upper hand among the Religious
Right.
But the GOP could be setting itself up for electability
problems in November 2016 if the field of candidates engages in pandering to hard-right
Christian Evangelical voters at the expense of moderate and independent-leaning
Republicans who often sit out the primaries.
primaries, candidates like Cruz and others will be eager to prove their bona
fides on Religious Right issues such as opposition to gay marriage and gun
purchase background checks, plus support for personhood provisions, abortion
bans that make no exceptions for rape or incest, and so-called religious
freedom laws such as the controversial statute in Indiana.
Clearly, none of those issues plays well with the
mainstream electorate that dominates general elections.
The tendency for primary season candidates to push
rightward and then attempt to tack back to the middle if nominated for the
general election could become especially tricky over the next 12 months as the early
stages of the Republican primary election schedule could be dominated by Southern
states with large populations of religious conservatives.
Southern super primary election for March 2016, one that would encompass Texas,
Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Georgia all voting on the same day. This
so-called SEC primary – based on its geographical similarities to college
athletics’ South Eastern Conference – would provide a trove of Evangelical
voters all heading to the polls in unison.
The Pew Research Center reports that the proportion of the Evangelical population in those
states is: Mississippi, 39 percent; Arkansas, 38 percent; Tennessee, 36
percent; Georgia, 28 percent; and Texas, 24 percent. (That Texas number is no
doubt skewed by the large number of Catholic Latinos — mostly Democrats — in
the Lone Star State.)
true believers and their outsized influence in the early stages of the 2012 primaries was
unmistakable. Nearly two-thirds of the GOP primary voters in South Carolina –
the third stop on the campaign trail – were self-described Evangelical
Christians. In first-in-the-nation Iowa, the percentage was 57 percent.
But Iowa serves as a microcosm of the GOP problem because
Evangelicals flock to the Republican caucuses while they only represent 24
percent of the Hawkeye State’s population, which is slightly below the U.S.
average of 26 percent.
State is one of several all-important swing states in presidential elections
where the Evangelical population is at or below the national average.
The others: Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New
Hampshire and Wisconsin. If the GOP nominee is Cruz or another contender
closely tied to a far-right Evangelical agenda, he or she may struggle to win
any of those seven states.
election candidate nearly requires winning a majority of those states.
