I have to admit, I’ve heard about Karl Rove’s drive to bring 4 million evangelical Christians who stayed home four years so many times, I was starting to think it’s true. Thankfully, Marisa Katz has done a terrific job challenging the conventional wisdom on this oft-repeated claim.
You’ve probably heard the pitch. Appearing at the American Enterprise Institute in December 2001, Rove said one of his campaign’s biggest failures in 2000 was not getting enough evangelical voters to the polls.
“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. … [T]here 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.”
It was a mistake he vowed never to repeat — but it’s a claim he has repeated constantly. But does Bush’s svengali know what he’s talking about? Marisa Katz makes a compelling case that these 4 million missing evangelicals are a myth.
First, we don’t even know how Rove arrived at this number. Experts in the field are more than a little skeptical about the statistic.
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.
So, the number may be unreliable, but is Rove’s strategy of boosting evangelical turnout sound in an electoral context? Not particularly.
It’s possible there are 4 million more evangelicals who might vote in this election, but even if they exist, they’re unlikely to single-handedly save Bush. The National Survey of Religion and Politics at the University of Akron shows that the evangelicals who are most staunchly Republican — that is, members of the religious right — live disproportionately in the South. “Many states where evangelicals are common, like South Carolina and Texas, are not competitive [for Kerry],” Green said. “It won’t matter.” And the Christian conservatives who do live in more closely contested states had a high turnout in 2000. Rallying their vote could help Bush a bit. But there’s not much room for improvement.
There may be thousands of disgruntled religious-right types sitting at home in Alabama, frustrated that Bush hasn’t tattooed the Ten Commandments to his forehead, but what difference could that possibly make to Rove? As Katz explained, most of these evangelicals live in obvious “Red” states in the South. Even if Rove did boost their turnout, his reward would be a victory in South Carolina by 20 points instead of 15.
Something about Rove’s strategy is obviously flawed. I’m inclined, to a limited extent, to assume Rove knows what he’s doing because, well, he’s Karl Rove. But then again, I also recall Rove thinking it was a brilliant idea for Bush to spend the final days of the 2000 race in California (where Gore ultimately won by 12 points) instead of a competitive battleground. In other words, the man does make mistakes and I can’t help but wonder if this obsession with the “missing” evangelicals is one of them.