Return to Rove, pt. 2

Yesterday I wondered about the surprising reemergence of a Republican strategy long deemed dead. In this week’s New Yorker, Peter J. Boyer writes an illuminating article about precisely this issue. Boyer is able to give some perspective to the McCain campaign’s surprising attempts to pander to the religious right over the past week.

The conventional wisdom had it that this election would not be, as the past two elections were, about securing the religious vote. Here are three reasons why that might have been so:

1) McCain has no credibility with the religious right. His gaffes – or what some might call reasonable responses – are well known.

2) The unpopularity of our current president will depress voter turnout among conservatives.

3) Obama has made stronger efforts than any Democrat in recent memory to appeal to religious voters.

The explanation for why this campaign has, until this last week, largely been about “change” and “experience,” and not about religious credentials, surely involves all three explanations to some degree. But let’s think for a moment about whether the events of the last week address any of them: has the selection of Sarah Palin and the deeply hateful RNC obviated any of the reasons a religious conservative might have had for withholding a vote for McCain in November?

First, (from Boyer) it’s clear that the Palin pick shores up some support among religious conservatives (he quotes Ralph Reed: “A home run”). Her mere presence on the ticket will drive the religious right wild – an important thing to do when Protestants are known, according to Karl Rove, for simply staying home when they find no mainstream candidate to their liking. But whether or not this will actually increase the numbers of religious votes McCain gets – either by convincing some religious voters not to vote for Obama, or by convincing some who otherwise wouldn’t have voted to register and vote for McCain – remains to be seen (see below for more comments). Interestingly, though, Palin’s speech at the RNC involved very little discussion of her social conservatism and she appeared, despite being on the ticket precisely because of these credentials, to be fighting the battle within the narrative it has had all along: reform, change and experience. McCain’s speech, heard in its entirety only by the caffeinated, likewise involved very little explicit pandering to the religious vote. Perhaps the Palin pick is a wink and a nod to the religious right, even when their “values” aren’t going to become part of the real narrative of this campaign. Perhaps that’s enough to secure their vote.

Second, whether or not Bush’s unpopularity will depress the vote is unclear. More to the point: it’s seems unlikely to depress the religious vote. But the question remains: if it does depress the vote among conservatives in general, or convinces some moderate conservatives to vote Democratic, will securing the vote of the religious conservatives be enough to win the election? That seems unlikely. McCain is walking a tightrope: he needs the vote of both moderate and independent voters, on the one hand, and religious conservatives, on the other, as Bush did, to win the election. But Bush’s unpopularity appears to have driven a wedge between these groups and it seems difficult to appeal to both. They’re trying: this is the explanation for Palin’s presence on the ticket but her refusal to publicly discuss her extreme social conservatism in any substantive way.

Third, Obama’s attempts to appeal to religious voters really seems to be working. Today, Gallup reports that support among white religious voters for Obama and McCain has stayed relatively steady throughout the campaign – even taking into account the Palin pick (but not the final two nights of the RNC). Obama does poorly among those who attend church weekly, extremely well among those who seldom or never attend church, and surprisingly well – almost as well as McCain – among those who attend church roughly monthly. But here’s the kicker: Obama matches Kerry’s 2004 numbers among the “weekly” and “never” groups, but he has jumped far ahead of Kerry’s 2004 numbers among the “monthly” group. Here are the numbers:

Obama appears to have made significant strides among the group of white voters who attend church monthly, and though he’s still losing to McCain, McCain is 12 points behind Bush’s numbers. Whether or not the Palin pick can chip away at those numbers remains to be seen.

A couple of conclusions:

1) McCain is in a very tough spot: he needs religious voters to secure his chance of winning, but he cannot ignore moderates and independents influenced by the unpopularity of Republicans. Hiring a religious conservative to pretend she’s not one appears to be the strategy.

2) The mere presence of a religious conservative who pretends she’s not one on the ticket hasn’t changed the white religious vote yet.

3) Independent voters are actually turned off by Sarah Palin.

So: this is a cobbled-together strategy. It is by no means clear that it will work.