Evangelicals Starting To Lose Faith In GOP?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, ReligionOne of the factors in the Dems win could have been a slight loss in the Republican’s devout base.
DALLAS (Reuters) – U.S. evangelicals have lost some of their enthusiasm for the Republican Party, a factor contributing to the party’s drubbing in Tuesday’s congressional elections, a new survey found.In a Beliefnet poll of 771 evangelical Christians from Tuesday to Thursday, 30 percent said they voted for fewer Republicans than in previous elections.
The findings were in line with exit poll estimates such as CNN’s, which found about 70 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican in Tuesday’s elections in which Democrats regained control of the U.S. Congress from
President George W. Bush’s Republicans.While still strong, that level of support was below the 74 to 78 percent range that different surveys found in the 2004 election.
No doubt that the Foley and Haggard scandals created some discontent in the base. And as the latest election has shown, the Republicans need all the devout they can get.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 and is filed under Elections, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 12th, 2006 at 5:33 am
[...] Donklephant: Evangelicals Starting To Lose Faith In GOP? [...]
November 12th, 2006 at 5:33 am
[...] Donklephant: Evangelicals Starting To Lose Faith In GOP? [...]
November 12th, 2006 at 10:01 am
The GOP will need to find a new whipping boy. The gay hate is wearing thin. And the liberal bashing is tired, too. The “base” will need a new hate object to motivate them.
Let’s see . . . Jews? No, the Evangelicals need Jews to bring on their Apocalypse. Blacks? No, that’s too 1964. Muslims are good, but kind of far away. Ideally a good whipping boy should be someone close at hand, someone domestic and capable of provoking fear. Mexicans would be good except that they are fundamentally conservative as a group — religious, pro-family.
Damn. Are we running out of despised minorities?
November 12th, 2006 at 10:28 am
m. takhallus, that is one of the cheapest shots I’ve seen in a long time. The “whipping boy” mentality may be used — but I would suspect that more of the white supremists than evangelicals. And any evangelicals that you can point to accurately as holding such hate-filled views, they are very few and very extreme.
If there is any one thing that will turn me (and probably most readers) completely off and away from potentially good blogs (like this one) is using a very broad brush to tar an entire segment of society with the taint of a very few extremists. And this goes for both ends of the extreme and those who get caught under the brush.
November 12th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Far from being a **new** cheap shot: m.takhallus’s comment is old to the point of being cartoonishly cliche’. Yes, the GOP is driven by hate, merely waiting to be focused upon the right victim group. I must say that I’m disappointed. Usually, you show a bit more creativity and flank your attack with some nuanced reasoning. I haven’t really seen you pick up the torch of identity-politics…but I guess the election has had effect. Besides, everyone knows that its not hate that drives the GOP, its greed and hypocrasy. Well, we can all talk about it at the lib-love-in between hits at the opening of “Bobby”.
November 12th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
So, the Evangelicals haven’t been attacking gay marriage and the so-called “homosexual agenda?”
The GOP didn’t craft the phrase “San Francisco liberals” and “San Francisco values” as blatant attempts to tie Democrats to gays and bring out the evangelical vote?
The GOP doesn’t place gay-bashing ammendments on ballots as a tactic to bring out the evangelical vote?
The GOP in Tennessee didn’t didn’t race-bait to beat Harold Ford just as they did in South Carolina to stop McCain?
If someone’s wrongly dissing evangelicals, kids, it’s starting with the GOP itself. They’re the ones who assume that gay-bashing is the way to squeeze out dollars and votes from the evangelical base. The Democrats turn out their vote with minimum wage and stem cell initiatives, the GOP goes to gay-bashing. Facts on the ground. If you don’t like it, talk to Karl Rove.
November 12th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
So everyone who disagrees with gay marriage is gay-bashing and hates gays? It takes two to tango, m.tak, and mass. & new jersey would suggests that maybe it isn’t all about the gay-hating Evangelicals.
November 12th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Well, just 50 years ago there were quite a few people that thought that black people shouldn’t marry white people, and in fact it was even accepted as justified and rational. Pretty much the same thing is happening today. Our society is finally realizing that one particular minority is being treated as less “equal” than everyone else.
Granted, there have been huge strides towards equality in the past generation – pre Stonewall gays would often be rounded up by the police in a bar raid, thrown into jail, and have their names published in the local paper, destroying many lives and families. Back a decade or two further, it was not uncommon for gays to be forceably committed to insane asylums, where they were “treated” with such methods as electroshock and drug aversion therapy, and even lobotomy. Of course in some backwards homophobic areas of the country, kids getting involuntarily committed to “ex-gay” brainwashing centers still happens today.
Many black people have conniption fits when gays liken their struggles for equality with the equal rights movement, saying, “you were never slaves!” Well, true there were worse atrocities associated with slavery, but that was nearly 150 years ago. Atrocities committed against gays are much more recent, and ongoing today. Thanks to evangelical anti-gay propaganda, hate crimes against gays are increasing faster than any other category, and are the highest on a per-capita basis of any minority group.
Get over it already…you have a right to not like gay people, but you do NOT have a right to deny gay people the constitutional rights everyone else gets automatically.
November 12th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Wow; This is like the old 1st grade game we used to play. Sit around in a circle, the teacher whispers something in ones ear, and in turn each child tries to repeat it to the next until, at the end everyone laughs at the deranged version of the original message.
The original post is about the possibility that the GOP is loosing their religious base, and a breif reference to a reason why; ex Rev Haggart, and ex Sen. Foley, both standing hi & mighty against Gays, advancing anti-gay issues, then being caught in Gay relationships, seemingly hypocritical of what they believe and , more importantly, effecting people in a negative way.
The sinful thing here isn’t the evangelical gay-bashing, it’s the way the GOP has used these volatile issues to manipulate the voters-you and I-to win votes. So, instead of debating important issues and deciding which way to go to get WHAT WE NEED, we sit here slappin each other in the face, and nothing changes…
November 12th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Wow; This is like the old 1st grade game we used to play. Sit around in a circle, the teacher whispers something in ones ear, and in turn each child tries to repeat it to the next until, at the end everyone laughs at the deranged version of the original message.
The original post is about the possibility that the GOP is loosing their religious base, and a breif reference to a reason why; ex Rev Haggart, and ex Sen. Foley, both standing hi & mighty against Gays, advancing anti-gay issues, then being caught in Gay relationships, seemingly hypocritical of what they believe and , more importantly, effecting people in a negative way.
The sinful thing here isn’t the evangelical gay-bashing, it’s the way the GOP has used these volatile issues to manipulate the voters-you and I-to win votes. So, instead of debating important issues and deciding which way to go to get WHAT WE NEED, we sit here slappin each other in the face, and nothing changes…
November 12th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
The defection of Evangelicals to the Democrats was on a pretty small scale, around three to 5%. I won’t wade into the “whipping boy” debate, but I’m delighted to see discussion among Christians about a responsibility to the environment (which they call “Creation care”), to the poor and disadvantaged, and a growing realization that they’ve been duped into some pretty un-Jesus-like behavior by the GOP.
November 12th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
I would just dearly love for this country and its citizens, religious organizations, and political parties to grow up, get past narrow evangelical quasi-religious mid-victorian (much less puritan!) attitudinalizing and admit that ALL PEOPLE deserve the same considerations and constitutional rights no matter within which particular niche they fall – no matter race, culture, religion, sexual orientation, gender….
Ultimately, it is no one individual’s right to pontificate or legislate about any other individual’s religious belief and the expression thereof, sexual choice and the expression thereof (leaving out before you excoriate me the obvious – children and their abuse in porn etc.), or political leanings and the expression thereof. Further, it is certainly not any political party’s place, nor even more tellingly, any religion’s place, to do so.
Each person in our country is responsible for himmerself alone. Why should anyone else attempt to make life decisions for himmer? We all are bound by laws which we understand (we *think*….) keep us safe and keep others safe as well. That’s truthfully all that most of us expect (or SHOULD expect) from government.
Unfortunately it seems that “most of us” aren’t willing to stand up for that belief. We abrogate our voices to whatever authority figure fits in our comfort zones, whether it’s the president, the pastor, or the local beat cop. We are lazy, afraid, unwilling to be different, unable to express our thoughts and feelings, angry, disaffected….
When will each of us stand up for what EACH OF US INDIVIDUALLY believes to be true within our hearts?
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.�
-Plato
The new kvetch in town….