NY Times Reports Giuliani to Embrace Abortion Rights

In what is seen as a direct challenge to the influence of the religious right in the Republican Party, the New York Times is reporting that Rudy Giuliani is going to announce for a woman's right to choose. Since 1980 Republican presidential candidates have announced their support for pro-life positions, regardless of their previous record or stated beliefs. This is about to turn the GOP primaries into a real battle between Rudy Giuliani and the people who supported George W. Bush and are credited with his re-election in 2004.

This will be fun to watch, although such a battle, if Giuliani wins the nomination could make him harder to beat in the 2008 election. This move will reinforce the media's desire to portray the political transvestite as some sort of "moderate" Republican without asking him where he stands on issues such as Bush's reckless tax cuts and the need to strengthen the social safety net.

One thing that could happen if Giuliani is nominated is the creation of a third party by right-to-lifers. Traditionally in America third parties are on the fringe unless they start to gain broader appeal. When that happens one of the two major parties co-opts the ideas of the third party and takes their supporters into its embrace.

That history, though, was created before the Internet. The Internet makes it possible to organize faster and link up people who have common beliefs but are physically far removed from each other. There is no reason why the Internet couldn't be used to create a third party.

The function of political parties was to bring groups of people together who shared a common belief system. Such people were spread out and needed an organization in order to combine their efforts to achieve political power. Once you have a very inexpensive way of finding out who people are that share your belief system, why do you necessarily need a political party?

Religious Conservatives in Iowa's GOP are Searching for a President

One of the pillars of the Iowa Republican Party has been white evangelicals. According to this article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer they are feeling like they don't have a candidate in the 2008 presidential race. They find Giuliani too socially liberal, they don't trust McCain, Romney is a Mormon, Brownback and Huckabee are long-shots. If this was to hold up until the GOP nomination, it could lead to religious conservatives sitting out the 2008 election. That would have huge consequences for Republicans up and down the ballot.

People get in trouble in politics when they start believing their own bs. Since 2004 white evangelicals in the Republican Party have bragged about their power over their party. That has led to those voters who don't share their beliefs getting worried and becoming more active themselves. In the Ohio 2006 election the Republican Party learned that a candidate who just appeals to part of a political party's base gets beat. If you don't believe us, just look at the totals in the Strickland-Blackwell campaign for governor.

It will be interesting to see what the reaction of the religious right is to the fact that Romney is now leading in the "money" primary and Giuliani is leading in the polls. Will they redouble their efforts to try and come up with a person they see as more acceptable? Will they suck it up and back one of the three front-runners? Or will they take their marbles and go home? The 2008 election chances for the GOP may depend on their choice.

The "Secular Vote" in the 2006 Ohio Senate Race

Right after the 2004 presidential election there were a lot of articles on how the Democratic Party was in trouble with members of the religious right and how that trouble led to Bush's re-election. For a long time this theme dominated the media. Very little attention was given to the other side of the equation and that is whether Republicans were in trouble with, for want of a better term, the secular left.

With the 2006 election cycle, however, some commentators began to pay attention to that side of the equation. John Green, director of the Bliss Center for Applied Politics at the University of Akron, was quoted in an article pointing out that Ohioans who were not regular church goers were organizing politically at the same rate as the religious right. Because of Green's comments, the following article at Huffington Post caught our eye: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-scher/the-conservatives-secul_b_42359.html In the article Bill Scher argues that conservatives have problems with the secular voters that are bigger than the problems liberals have with the religious voters.

Based on that column, we examined the results of the CNN exit poll for Ohio's Senate race in 2006. That examination showed some interesting results.

According to the exit poll, 16% of Ohio voters surveyed attended church more than once a week. Among that group DeWine beat Brown by 62% to 38%. The same poll showed 30% attending weekly and among that group DeWine beat Brown by the much narrower margin of 52% to 48%. Respondents who only attended church once a month went for Brown by a margin of 59 to 48% and they accounted for 13% of the respondents. Respondents who attended church a few times a year accounted for 27% of the respondents and Brown beat DeWine by 69% to 31%. Respondents who never attended church accounted for 13% of the respondents and they went for Brown by a whopping 74% to 26%.

The survey is interesting for several reasons. First of all, it shows that respondents who attend church once a month or less accounted for 53% of the respondents. Second, only among the voters who attended church more than once a week did DeWine have a significant lead over Brown of 24%. They accounted for 16% of the respondents. Brown, however, significantly exceed that margin with those respondents who never attended church when he beat DeWine by 48% and they accounted for 13% of the respondents. Third while the biggest group, those attending church once a week did go for DeWine by 4%, the second biggest group, those attending church only a few times a year went for Brown by 38% of the vote. Brown was able to decisively beat DeWine among voters who have no or little church attendance while staying close to DeWine among those voters who attend church weekly.

A lot of this is being missed by the mainstream media. Most media commentators would not find anything "new" in secular voters voting for Democrats. They probably believe that such voting has been taking place for years. Such a belief is probably correct. What is new, however, may be that such voters are now overwhelmingly voting for Democrats.
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You can view the entire CNN exit poll results for the Brown-DeWine race by clicking on this entry's title.

Using Federal Funds to Reward Your Friends

The following is from the first paragraph of a story on the blog "Talk to Action":

Wade Horn has been very kind to Religious Right organizations, including the one that he founded in 1994 with Religious Right money -- the National Fatherhood Initiative in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Appointed by President Bush as Assistant Secretary for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, Horn oversees an annual budget of 47 billion dollars. Horn has shown that he knows all about the hand that feeds, and now, he has taken care to feed the National Fatherhood Initiative with a "Capacities Building" grant in the amount of $999,534 from a program he started in his agency and called by the familiar-ringing name of the "Responsible Fatherhood Initiative."

The whole article can be viewed by clicking on the link in this entry's title. Talk to Action is a blog that reports on what it calls "The Religious Right".