Myth of McCain’s Weakness Among Evangelicals

ARRA News Service: by Steven Waldman, president & editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com on the WSJ Political Perceptions: Conventional wisdom holds that John McCain is struggling to win evangelical voters. Evangelical leader Mark DeMoss predicted last week that he’d run weaker than any Republican since 1976 . . . Sen. McCain has been criticized by prominent Christian leaders such as James Dobson . . . In the primaries, most Christian leaders backed Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. More recently, Sen. McCain’s decision to jettison two prominent conservative Christians – John Hagee and Rod Parsely – has sent his ratings plummeting . . . .

But is this conventional wisdom really true? Or to be more precise, Sen. McCain clearly has a problem with evangelical leaders — but does he really have a major problem with evangelical voters? On the contrary, Sen. McCain won the nomination in part because he did far better than expected with rank-and-file evangelicals. . . . For instance, in New Hampshire, among the 21% of the Republican electorate that was evangelical or “born again,” Sen. McCain won 29%, Mr. Romney 28% and Mr. Huckabee 27% — even though Mr. Huckabee is a former evangelical preacher and Mr. Romney had the endorsements of many key Christian leaders. . . .

In a recent Rasmussen poll, Sen. McCain was winning 58% of evangelicals, and . . . Sen. Barack Obama, was winning 32%. . . . Why would Sen. McCain be doing so much better among evangelical voters than evangelical leaders? First, the leadership’s disgust with Sen. McCain stems from the candidate’s treatment of them. His “agents of intolerance” speech was not an attack on evangelicals, but on a few of their leaders. Second, some of the issues over which Christian leaders have chastised Sen. McCain are inside-the-beltway concerns that don’t resonate with rank-and-file voters. . . . Third, though he’s reluctant to talk about his personal faith, in many ways Sen. McCain is substantively in perfect alignment with today’s evangelical voters. . . . Fourth, Sen. McCain’s support of the Iraq war, his war-hero history and his emphasis on fighting terrorism appeals to those Christians who feel that fighting Islam has risen to the top of the list of important issues for Christians. . . . Sen. McCain’s problems with rank-and-file evangelical voters have been vastly overstated. . . . [Read More]