Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media?
But let a couple of evangelical ministers break with the GOP, and suddenly, if you’re EJ Dionne, it’s a trend?
When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.
Rick Warren is famous for his book The Purpose-Driven Life. He’s famous for donating a lot of money to AIDS research. He’s not famous as an especially conservative evangelical.
But EJ Dionne either doesn’t know that (do they all look the same to him?) or assumes his audience doesn’t.
Another fact; while the left is hopping up and down like monkeys flinging poo because some evangelicals flaked away from the GOP this past election, the numbers are a tad more sobering than that. In 2004, 22% of evanglicals voted Democrat. Last month? 30%.
And they’ve been fickle before. In 2000, when the issues on the table didn’t especially excite evangelicals, they stayed home in droves; some pollsters estimated that Bush would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college had evangelicals turned out in the same force they had in ’94, ’02 and ’04.
Finally – ’08 is another whole campaign. And the Democrat party at its highest level – once you get past the blandishments of Barack Obama, who is not exactly the favorite candidate of the Democrat inner circle – is intrinsically hostile to evangelical beliefs. They may run hot and cold on the GOP itself, but the fact that evangelicans have never been in the Democrat camp (not in recent memory,anyway) should tell you something; that, Rick Warren notwithstanding, Democrat evangelicals are a situational aberration, not a trend. EJ: get back to me in ’08 or ’10.
Mr. Dionne; I’ve met Mac Hammond, and Rick Warren is no Mac Hammond.
“Liberal evangelical leaders” always seem to be more popular with liberal columnists and ‘world leaders’ than they are with rank and file evangelicals.
God bless you Mitch for always being wrong.
“Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media?”
Here are the actual GOP Vote %s in 92-96-00-04-06
Af-Am 10-12-9-11-10
Hisp/Latino 25-21-35-44-30
Asian 55-48-41-44-37
The only case where there was a trend away from Democrats is the Latino 2000 and 2004 vote and I certainly remember lots of coverage of GWB outreach to the Latino community i.e. “family values do not stop at the Rio Grande”. For blacks there is no trend and for Asians the have actuall fliped from Republican voters to Dems.
Once again the facts show their well known liberal bias.
Here is the data
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.0.html
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/index.epolls.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_1992
God Bless you Mitch for making such falsifiable claims.
“Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media?”
Here is the GOP vote% in 92-96-00-04-06 elections
Af-Am 10-12-9-11-10
Hisp/Latino 25-21-35-44-30
Asian 55-48-41-44-37
The only time a group crossed lines in large numbers was Latinos in 2000 and 2004. I sure do remember lots of coverage of GWB’s outreach to that community i.e. ‘Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande’.
Black are unchanged.
For Asians, you are dead wrong since they actualy flipped from GOP voters to Dem voters.
Once again the facts betray their well-known liberal bias.
Rick,
The ’06 elections were hardly dispositive; the GOP lost among MOST groups.
But there was virtually no coverage of the GOP’s increasing showing among hispanics and blacks from ’92 through ’04…
…compared to the rabid, deep coverage that the thin film of Dem-switching Evangelicals has gotten.
Mitch:
There was no ‘increasing showing’ among African-Americans. A one or two point variation is thin material for a ‘trend’ story. In, fact the Democratic Af-Am vote went 83-84-90-88-89, so Republicans were falling even further behind.
Bush’s success with Hispanic voters was a HUGE story. If you think there was ‘virtually no coverage’ I suggest you try Google. His appeal to hispanic voters was a central part of the Bush campaign and the press storyline. Do we really have to pull out lexis-nexis on this?
I bet that if we sat down with a stack of New York Times back issues, I could find more ‘Bush gets support from Latinos’ stories than you could find ‘Dems get support from Evangelicals’ stories.
Finally, do you think the Obama / Warren story would get half the play it got, if other Evangelicaals had not said anything about it?
Now that I think about it, there were actually a ton of stories about GWB’s outreach to the Af-Am community. Lots of stories about black preachers buying into the faith based inititive and how gay marriage was forcing blacks to abandon the Democratic party. I dare say there were lots more of these stories than than a pitiful 2% GOP swing in 2004 merited.
Oh, yeah…
God bless you Mitch for always being wrong
…and yet hiding it from you often enough to mop the floor with you on virtually every disagreement.
Dubya’s *outreach* got a little coverage – but the fact that it worked (in context of the previous numbers and the Democrats’ increasingly-cynical race-baiting) was not (outside the alternative media).
And the “pitiful” 2% swing was a 22% improvement over previous showings.
Which is pretty good for a demographic that’s considered in the bag for the Dems in a way that Evangelicals never were for the GOP.
Sorry for the almost double post, I thought the first one was bounced b/c of the hyperlinks.
If you want to play stupid math games the 7% evangelical swing to Dems in 06 was 350% the size of the Af-Am swing to Bush.
Put your money where your mouth is. Instead of making unverifiable assertions about media coverage lets find someone with nexis-lexis and settle this. I am willing to bet some adult beverages that Bush gets more favorable coverage of his Hispanic outreach than Dems got for their evagelical outreach in 2006
Your offer to bet is magnanimous indeed – but the resolution is utterly subjective.
For example, much of the coverage of Bush’s outreach to Afro-Americans was very skeptical in tone, while the coverage of the evangelicals seems to accept as a given there’s a huge rift among evangelicals which is not evidenced by any facts.
I’ll take the beer anyway, but I’m just saying.
Of course “skeptical in tone” is subjective and hard to measure. That is why when people like me press people like you to prove claims of media bias, you immediately fall back onto subjective unprovable claims like this.
Well that was the nice thing about your original claim, “nary a word”, was that it was more objective and somewhat measurable.
Of course “skeptical in tone” is subjective and hard to measure. That is why when people like me press people like you to prove claims of media bias, you immediately fall back onto subjective unprovable claims like this.
And quoting people like Mark Halperin (chief of politics @ ABC News) who admits liberal bias in as many words.
I mean, we wouldn’t want to leave that out, would we?