GOP has a 2016 Evangelical problem

Sen. Ted Cruz’s transparent bid to secure the Republican Party’s evangelical vote right out of the gate – delivering a televangelist-style presidential announcement speech last week at a religious school, Liberty University -- is sure to inspire efforts by other presidential wannabes to prevent the Texas senator from gaining the upper hand among the Religious Right.
But the GOP could be setting itself up for electability problems in November 2016 if the field of candidates engages in pandering to hard-right Christian Evangelical voters at the expense of moderate and independent-leaning Republicans who often sit out the primaries.

Because Evangelicals may play such a key role in the 2016 primaries, candidates like Cruz and others will be eager to prove their bona fides on Religious Right issues such as opposition to gay marriage and gun purchase background checks, plus support for personhood provisions, abortion bans that make no exceptions for rape or incest, and so-called religious freedom laws such as the controversial statute in Indiana.

Clearly, none of those issues plays well with the mainstream electorate that dominates general elections.
The tendency for primary season candidates to push rightward and then attempt to tack back to the middle if nominated for the general election could become especially tricky over the next 12 months as the early stages of the Republican primary election schedule could be dominated by Southern states with large populations of religious conservatives.

According to NBC News, GOP operatives are crafting a Southern super primary election for March 2016, one that would encompass Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Georgia all voting on the same day. This so-called SEC primary – based on its geographical similarities to college athletics’ South Eastern Conference – would provide a trove of Evangelical voters all heading to the polls in unison.

The Pew Research Center reports that the proportion of the Evangelical population in those states is: Mississippi, 39 percent; Arkansas, 38 percent; Tennessee, 36 percent; Georgia, 28 percent; and Texas, 24 percent. (That Texas number is no doubt skewed by the large number of Catholic Latinos -- mostly Democrats -- in the Lone Star State.)

Evangelicals already carry the label of Republican true believers and their outsized influence in the early stages of the 2012 primaries was unmistakable. Nearly two-thirds of the GOP primary voters in South Carolina – the third stop on the campaign trail – were self-described Evangelical Christians. In first-in-the-nation Iowa, the percentage was 57 percent.

But Iowa serves as a microcosm of the GOP problem because Evangelicals flock to the Republican caucuses while they only represent 24 percent of the Hawkeye State’s population, which is slightly below the U.S. average of 26 percent.

Michigan is right at the U.S. average but the Great Lakes State is one of several all-important swing states in presidential elections where the Evangelical population is at or below the national average.

The others: Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. If the GOP nominee is Cruz or another contender closely tied to a far-right Evangelical agenda, he or she may struggle to win any of those seven states.

And the path to the presidency for a Republican general election candidate nearly requires winning a majority of those states.