An article on The New Republic's TRN Online site (alas,
subscribers only) raises some pertinent questions about Bush
campaign guru Karl Rove's evangelical-vote strategy. In "Off
Base," Marisa Katz notes Rove's frequently cited remark before
the American Enterprise Institute, where he said:
"If you look at the model of the electorate, and you look at the model of who voted, the big discrepancy is among self-identified, white, evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and fundamentalists. ... There should have been 19 million of them, and instead there were 15 million of them. Just over four million of them failed to turn out and vote... that you would have anticipated voting in a normal presidential election."
Rove has made capturing those "missing" 4 million evangelical
votes the centerpiece of his campaign strategy, advising Bush, it's
widely believed, to push for a Federal Marriage Amendment. But it
seems no one is quite sure where Rove's numbers come from. Writes
Katz:
Rove has never disclosed his sources or explained his methodology, and even the most respected analysts of evangelical opinion can't divine the origin of his statistics. "Whether the four million is the right number is unclear for me, and it's always been unclear for me since the first day I heard it," said John Green, a University of Akron political scientist who has been studying the U.S. evangelical community for 30 years. "That's a figure [Rove]'s been throwing around for several years, and I don't know what he's talking about," agreed Furman University political scientist James Guth, who has an equally long history of evangelical scholarship.
And upon this, Rove - and Bush - decided to sacrifice a verified
(by Voter News Service exit polling) 1.1 million gay GOP votes
(here
are the figures).
Just a Thought
Groups like the Human Rights Campaign should more honestly
define themselves as outreach organizations that mobilize gays and
lesbians to support liberal issues and vote for Democrats -- rather
than as lobbyists seeking to pressure Democrats (and Republicans)
on behalf of gays and lesbians.
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