Social conservatives not GOP's problem

David Paul Kuhn:

There is a brooding sense within top social conservative circles that they have become the revolving scapegoat of the Republican Party. Many of the longtime leaders of the Christian right, from Richard Land to Tony Perkins to Gary Bauer, expressed resentment in extended interviews with a singular theme: that the most loyal GOP bloc has been so quickly thrown under many critics' bus.

"There are powerful interest groups in the party and in the country that are trying to scapegoat social conservatives," Land said, who has long served as a bridge between Southern Baptists' political concerns and GOP leadership. "It's people who have no problem ignoring facts."

Social conservatives have proven perhaps the most loyal Republicans. The September 15th economic crisis brought Democrats to new ground across red America. States from Florida to North Carolina to Indiana shifted to Barack Obama after the market crash. In this last chapter of the campaign Obama made inroads with GOP strongholds like white men.

But social conservatives did not budge. Only 29 percent of whites who attend church weekly backed Obama. That is the precise portion who voted for Al Gore and John Kerry. Half of all Americans who voted for John McCain were weekly church attendees. White evangelicals or born-again Christians comprised 42 percent of the GOP vote, according to exit polls.

Yet despite their loyalty to the GOP, traditionally, after national losses, social conservatives feel like the whipping boy of GOP critics.

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Voters under age 30 are more likely to believe abortion should be illegal than voters age 30 to 64, by a margin of 48 to 41 percent, according to the April poll by the Pew Research Center--a trend Pew polling also found in 2008. Pew polling in recent years has however also shown that younger voters are less likely to oppose gay marriage.

Still, overall, it does seem peculiar that in this year, of all years, discussion of the GOP's minority status has centered mostly on moving away from cultural conservatives.

Not since 1980 has the economy so dominated a presidential campaign, based on the portion of voters who selected it as their primary issue in exit polls. Sixty-three percent of voters said the economy was their top issue in the presidential campaign. A Pew post-election media report found that social issues--like abortion or gay marriage--constituted less than one percentage point of all campaign news, surely a low since the beginning of the Reagan era.

On Election Day, in one of the few metrics of national cultural debates, a majority of voters in California, Arizona and Florida approved bans on same-sex marriage.

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The social conservatives provided the winning margin in 2004. In 2008, the economy became an issue shortly after the nomination and that was the game changer. It will probably be the game changer in the next few elections and it may change the power back to the GOP as Obama's control freak economic policies fail.