How should Republicans court the conservative Christian vote in 2016? Among the presidential candidates, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are offering competing models for maintaining and growing a critical part of the GOP’s coalition in the primaries and in the general election. Both strategies show promise and peril.
The former Florida governor is taking a page out of his brother George W. Bush’s political playbook, calling for what amounts to a compassionate conservatism for the post-Obama era. “I do believe, I honestly believe that as a conservative that believes in limited government, we need to put the most vulnerable in our society first, in the front of the line,” Bush said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington in mid-June.
His rhetoric among the faith-focused crowd emphasizes shared Christian values and duty toward fellow man, even if it’s not always clear how this translates into policy on health care or taxes. “We could shut down government if we all acted on our sense of consciousness about helping others,” he said.
Not that Bush doesn’t talk or care about the social issues that have energized white evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics to pull the GOP lever. He’s pro-life, like the rest of the Republican field, and says marriage should be only between a man and a woman. He connects these issues to actions he took as governor, like passing tougher regulations on Florida’s abortion clinics and intervening to keep alive the vegetative Terri Schiavo after a court ordered her feeding tube pulled. But always, Bush’s pitch is couched in terms of Christian compassion, with an eye to appealing not just to traditional Republican voters but Hispanic and black Christians as well as moderate whites.
“We took special care for the most vulnerable in our society,” he says of his eight years in office.
If Bush is a lover, Cruz is a fighter. “I will never, ever, ever shy from standing up and defending the religious liberty of every American,” said the Texas senator at the same conference. He predicted 2016 will be “the religious liberty election.” Close Cruz-watchers won’t be surprised to hear him use combative rhetoric in addressing these issues. At the conference, Cruz mentioned the “forces of darkness and threats that face” conservative people of faith.
“The battles today have only intensified,” he said. “In fact, just this week I think the EPA has named religious liberty an endangered species.”
Cruz wants to show evangelical voters not only that he’s fought on the right side of important religious liberty battles but also that he’s one of them. He sounded part litigator, part preacher as he described his religious freedom legal work to the Faith and Freedom Coalition. One case brought Cruz toe-to-toe with the ACLU, which sought to remove a white cross from a World War I veterans’ memorial on federal land in the Mojave Desert. Several federal courts had ruled the cross be taken down, and the question lay before the Supreme Court.
“They said you could not gaze upon the image of a cross on federal lands,” Cruz said. “Well, I’ll tell you this. They were right on one thing. The cross has power.”
And the people of the cross, Cruz insists, have untapped political power. “There are, right now, about 90 million evangelical Christians in America. Fifty million evangelicals are staying home.” It was an echo of his announcement speech at Liberty University, where Cruz said “roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting.” There, the senator asked the evangelical crowd to “imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”
It looks like Cruz’s “turn out the base” strategy could succeed in the GOP primary but be devastating in the general, whereas Bush’s broad-based approach hurts his chances for the nomination while helping the party overall in November 2016. But it isn’t that simple, says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron and senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. He says they’re chasing different types of Republican primary voters.
The Cruz method focuses on maximizing turnout of those evangelicals who are primarily social conservatives—a smart move, Green says, when early primary states like Iowa and South Carolina have an abundance of socially conservative voters. Cruz has two problems, though. First, he’s not alone in the Republican primary. Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, and Ben Carson are all competing in a similar way for the socially conservative vote. Two, if evangelical votes are concentrated in reliably red states, there may be no added value in chasing more of them.“I don’t think there’s huge room for Republicans to grow” with evangelicals, Green says.
But not all evangelical voters are motivated primarily by issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, even if they sympathize or agree with social conservatives. “Many evangelicals are social conservatives, but evangelicals are all very Republican,” says Green.
Consider the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses, where 60 percent of the voters were evangelicals. Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister who emphasized a socially conservative message, won with 34 percent of the vote, including 46 percent of the evangelical vote. But that means 54 percent of Republican evangelicals voted for another candidate, such as Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, or John McCain.
So there’s an opportunity for Bush and others in the field (potentially including Ohio governor John Kasich) to woo evangelicals as honest-to-God moderates. The candidate would then avoid sounding too strident on social issues that might damage him against Hillary Clinton, the thinking goes.
Gary Bauer, a leading Christian conservative activist within the GOP, disagrees that the Republican nominee can afford to be a social moderate in the primary or the general election. He says the expected Supreme Court defeat for conservatives on same-sex marriage could “demoralize” those voters on whom the GOP has relied to win elections in the past. Republicans, he believes, must take a stand on religious liberty or prepare to lose, no matter who is the nominee.
“If the party is not willing and able to fight on that, you would see an unraveling of the coalition,” Bauer says. He points out that in 2004, George W. Bush eked out a win in Ohio (and thus won reelection) by maximizing turnout in the culturally conservative rural counties. These were lower-income evangelical Protestants drawn to the GOP for its message on marriage and cultural values. Winning a critical swing state like Ohio in 2016, Bauer says, means not taking those voters for granted.
What remains to be seen is if Bush and other candidates nearer the middle of the party (like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker) can strike the right balance. At the Washington conference, Bush didn’t shy away from the questions of religious liberty raised in the Obama era, though he wasn’t as forceful or passionate as Cruz. “In a big, diverse country, we need to make sure we protect not just the right to have religious views but the right of acting on those views,” Bush said. It’s true the line didn’t bring the crowd to their feet. But that posture could be enough.
Michael Warren is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the medical condition of Terri Schiavo.
