The Democratic Party has been destroying themselves over the past few weeks in this battle between Obama and Clinton. Tonight though, the Compassion forum at Messiah College was a huge step forward for the Democrats in going after the evangelical voters, especially with young evangelicals. George Bush won White Evangelicals by a 78-21 margin in 2004. If the Democrats can cut that down even to 65-35, you are talking about huge gains.
How do the democrats do that? Well the answer is two fold. First, evangelicals are changing. These evangelicals are not the Jerry Faldwell Moral Majority evangelicals of the 1980s. They are not satisfied with focusing just on abortion and gay marriage. While the abortion issue is usually their #1 issue, they care about the environment, poverty, and AIDS just to list a few, along with the typical trio of abortion, gay marriage and stem cells.
So what can the Democrats do? Support the evangelicals on the issues they agree on and not shun them based off of their abortion views. Don’t treat faith as a taboo, rather embrace it. That is exactly what both Hillary and Obama did tonight. Obama was particularly good at expressing his faith. He was able to take an understandable position on abortion that will not turn off many young evangelicals, even though most disagree with him.
While the Republicans seem to be more enslaved but the Club for Growth economic conservatives, the Democrats are staring to embrace the evangelicals who never really bought the whole conservative movement in the first place at mass. They held strong beliefs and one party shunned them while the other took them in and build a majority. The Democrats have been attacking that group, and they are going to reap what they have been sowing.
