Are Democrats the New Conservatives?

“Republicans in danger of losing US ‘God vote’,” claimed Britain’s Daily Telegraph the other day, over a piece by Washington correspondent Toby Harnden. The piece was brief and its argument less than convincing, but I think its conclusion might be true anyway. If so, we could be seeing the start of a major realignment in American politics, and with it a useful clarification of what “conservative” and “liberal” ought to mean.

Let’s start with Harnden’s piece: His premise is that neither Fred Thompson (divorced) nor Rudy Giuliani (twice divorced) shows any interest in attending church or otherwise humoring the party’s Christian base – whereas Hillary Clinton (never divorced) is a regular churchgoer and says God helped her through the rough patches with Bill.

Yes, this argument looks weak, and Harnden weakened it further with quotes from Christian-right activist Gary Bauer, who countered obviously that Ronald Reagan was a divorced non-regular-churchgoer, while Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both non-divorced regular-churchgoers (and self-described “born again Christians,” I might add). Bauer also stated that “[Christian v]oters are looking for somebody that they can agree with on the definition of marriage and on life and religious liberty and the larger war on Islamo-fascism and who can defeat Hillary Clinton.” In other words, Christians still prefer the Republican brand no matter who the new CEO might be.

Strictly speaking, that appears to be true. Although Harnden didn’t mention it, Gallup did a poll in July showing that churchgoers preferred Rudy over Hillary 53% to 42%, while non-churchgoers preferred Hillary by roughly the same margin. These two populations are about the same size, which helps to explain why Rudy and Hillary polled evenly, back in July, in a hypothetical head-to-head race.

However, although I don’t know of similar polls of churchgoers before July that would help in mapping out the trend here, it’s clear that in the broader head-to-head polls Hillary has gained about ten points over the past six months and now seems to have a slight lead. It’s hard to imagine that at least some of that shift hasn’t occurred among churchgoing Christians.

The July poll also indicated that Giuliani, among all the Republican candidates, was the only one to poll markedly lower among weekly churchgoers (24%) than among less-frequent churchgoers (33%), suggesting that if he is the candidate the family-values Christians will be looking for excuses to vote for someone else – and you can bet Clinton (or Gore if he throws his hat in) will try to be there for them. (more…)