Electoral Math
Reality-Based^TM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot

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Karl Rove's fuzzy math, part 867
Stuck in my head: Clipse, "Young Boy"

You play to win the game. Hello! You play to win the game.

-Herman Edwards

As Bush continues his "rally the base" efforts this spring, GOP campaign managers and spokespeople keep claiming that Bush's real problem in the 2000 election wasn't the center, it was the base; they speculate that 4 million evangelical Christians stayed home because Bush wasn't conservative enough. Here's a Washington Times article that mentions this number. I went to try and figure out how realistic Rove's figure is, and I think I have some bullet points to suggest that it's unrealistic.

• Increasing voter turnout would buck historical trends. In the last 40 years, voter turnout in presidential elections has increased exactly three times. In 1984, voter turnout increased compared to 1980, for which I have no good explanation.  In 1992, Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate, likely drawing many disaffected voters to the polls and energizing voters for the other candidates as well. In 2000, after an easily predictable 1996 election featuring an incredibly successful incumbent, turnout picked up again with more competitive circumstances, and a 3rd party candidate. If turnout increased for two straight elections it would be literally unprecedented; though, historical events such as the war and the gay marriage amendment may drive such turnout.
  
• There aren't that many social conservatives. Based on data from the 2000 exit polls, 14% of the voters in 2000 self-reported as members of the religious right. There were 105.6 million voters in that election, so the religious right totaled roughly 14.8 million voters.
  
  The American Religious Data Archive counts almost 40 million members of the big, white, evangelical churches as of 2000. Adding in the Mormons (4.2 million) and Jehovah's Witnesses (1.0M), there are a total of 45.2 million voters who are potentially part of the religious right. However, this figure includes children, so in practice there are closer to 33.7 million voting age evangelicals.
  
  And now we get to the punchline. Given the overall turnout in 2000 51.3%, and assuming turnout is basically uniform for any given demographic, we might expect around 17.2 million evangelicals voters to turn out. So the numbers suggest that more like 2.4 million voters who stayed home in protest of Bush's moderate social views.
  
  One may quibble that some of these church-goers would not identify themselves as part of the religious right, but I suspect they would be balanced equally by voters from other denominations (for example, staunchly conservative Catholics) who did. Adding in the Church of God in Christ, a black Pentecostal church that is quite conservative on gay rights issues, and you do get a figure of 4.5 million that looks more like Rove's number. But this is Enron-style accounting on at least four fronts. First, I find it hard to believe that black voters will really be single issue voters on gay marriage (if they are, this is marked a success for Republicans and may eventually put an end to the vast racial divide between the two parties, which is certainly a good thing for the long term health of our government); I suspect that poverty and racial healing are much larger concerns. Second, not all "evangelicals" are necessarily opposed to gay rights: the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (5.15 million) is decidedly welcoming of gay members; the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (2.58 million) is centrist, noting that homosexuality is a sin, but that Christians should extend love towards gays and their families. Third, it assumes that by proposing an amendment against gay marriage, all of these church goers will sudednly come out and vote for him, blindingly following their minister if he suggests we should vote against them. Exit polls from 2000 suggest otherwise; with a middling economy, Gore carried one in five members of the Religious Right. It's quite possible that voters who feel more moderate than their fire-breathing minister may be turned off by the rhetoric of the religious right and decide to go out and vote against Bush, or vote on the economy, or vote on foreign policy, or anything else.
  
• There are almost as many social liberals. Small sample size caveats apply, but exit polls suggest half of the Nader voters voted for Nader "with reservations", probably because they were worried a vote for Nader really was a vote for Bush. These voters probably care most about the environment. In 2000, Gore made a conscious decision not to talk about evironmental issues very much for fear of being seen as anti-growth. Today, Kerry has a tremendous record and continues to speak out about the environment, and an opponent who has an incredibly poor record. That's 1.5 million voters. And these are people who had the energy to vote -- Rove, meanwhile, is counting on people who stayed home suddenly to spring into action on his behalf. There are likely an equal number of voters on the left who were turned off by the seemingly mushy contrast between Gore and Bush and who figured Gore would win on the economy alone -- I fully admit to being one of them. And there is just no way those voters are going to think that both parties are the same after three years of an assault on civil liberties, of judicial appointments moving against various progressive causes, of neoconservative unilateralism, and of a dismantling of the environmental programs. I suspect these voters will make a point of going to the election this year.
  
  To put this another way, in American politics every action has an equal or greater opposite reaction. That's why Eisenhower couldn't readily come out and embrace Brown without risking his re-election, and that's why Nixon beat the pants off of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 after LBJ passed the civil rights act. The idea that you can win a national election simply by whipping up support among your parties base is hogwash: its more likely to work better for Republicans than Democrats. The DLC has routinely lambasted the fallacy of this theory of politics. For the curious, take a look at "The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency", an analysis of the failings of the Dukakis campaign.
  
• It's not clear what states these voters are from. Appealing to conservative church going types may help drive up the vote count in places he doesn't need it, like Utah and Texas and Alabama. But in all honesty, so what if Bush wins those states 58-42 instead of 56-44? Likewise, if he alienates moderates in California, is it really going to hurt him in winning the election? The real question is whether or not this will help in states that may have a lot of cultural conservatives who vote their values (MO, PA, OH, FL) more than it hurts in states where people like states' rights and independence, or where there may be a hefty gay population (NM, AZ, NV, OR, FL. Yes, I meant to list Florida twice). And for that, we really have to wait until November.
  
• If you think this might work, consider the counter example. Suppose a sitting incumbent Democrat decided he could win the election by driving up the black vote and Hispanic vote -- who combine far larger percentage of the population than evangelicals. So he proposes amnesty for all illegal immigrants, and monetary reparations for slavery. After all, he only needs 25% or so of the white vote to win if every black and Hispanic in the country are on his side. To pay for this, he proposes an even more progressive tax scheme, along with reinstating the estate tax, and maybe a cut to the Navy budget while he's at it. Do you really think he's going to win the election? Of course he isn't, because nearly every white person in the country will march to the polls against it.

So I conclude that the "4 million evangelicals" are largely a figment of Rove's imagination, and more of that "Washington fuzzy math" that Bush railed against in 2000.

Coming next: an attempt to determine where, if anywhere, this cultural wedge issue will affect swing states. We'll look at the demographics of some individual church denominations.

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Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 11:29 13 February 2005