WASHINGTON (ABP) — Come-from-behind wins by overtly Christian presidential candidates in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses will put even more of the spotlight on faith issues in the 2008 election cycle, according to two experts on religion and politics.
Baptist minister Mike Huckabee played David to Mitt Romney's Goliath on the Republican side, with the former Arkansas governor walloping the former Massachusetts governor's better-funded and -staffed campaign.
For Democrats, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — whose campaign has long devoted resources to appealing to moderate and progressive Christians — soundly defeated Hillary Clinton. Just weeks before, the New York senator and former first lady had seemed to many observers like the inevitable nominee and establishment candidate of the party once led by her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
“The obvious story … is that tons and tons of evangelical caucus voters turned out for Huckabee,” said Laura Olson, a Clemson University political-science professor and expert on the Religious Right. Exit polls cited by the major television networks Jan. 3 showed that 60 percent of GOP caucus-goers considered themselves evangelical or “born-again” Christians. Of those, 46 percent voted for Huckabee.
“I think the sub-story, too, is that … there's been a lot of talk in the months leading up to this that maybe the Religious Right is a little bit more fractioned than it used to be,” Olson continued. “But … rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated, as the results show.”
Prior to his surge in Iowa, Huckabee has gotten little support from prominent evangelical conservatives on the national level. But a grassroots campaign among pastors, evangelical home-school families and conservative Christians in Iowa seems to have paid significant dividends for the Huckabee campaign.
“He's really captured the imagination of evangelicals,” said Barry Hankins, a Baylor University professor and expert on conservative evangelicalism.
While the prominent leaders of the Evangelical Right have not united behind a candidate, Olson and Hankins noted, they may do so if Huckabee's momentum carries him beyond Iowa into other early-voting states.
“I think that there are some Christian Right figures that would get behind him if he was viable,” Hankins said. “I think they're holding their cards” until the picture becomes clearer.
Olson said Huckabee's resounding victory in spite of lacking support from the GOP establishment means that the most influential surviving leaders of the Religious Right — such as Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Southern Baptist ethics guru Richard Land — could be moving toward irrelevancy when it comes to elections.
“The power of the Religious Right movement … is increasingly about what happens on the ground and not about what Dobson says or what Richard Land says or what any of these other dons say,” she said.
Meanwhile, more centrist and progressive evangelicals — particularly younger ones — may be more open than their fellow believers to an Obama presidency. Obama has written and spoken repeatedly about his adult conversion experience at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He even took his campaign autobiography's title, The Audacity of Hope, from that of a favorite sermon his pastor delivered there.
“Obama has more appeal to moderate-to-liberal people of faith than either certainly Hillary Clinton or even, to a lesser extent, [former North Carolina Sen.] John Edwards,” Olson said. That owes to the fact, she added, that Obama “has done, I think, of the three the best job of bringing the discussion of faith and values to the race.”
Conservative Christians for whom abortion rights and gay rights are the most important issues are still unlikely to back Obama.
“Is he going to get fundamentalists to vote for him? Certainly he's not,” Olson said. “But there's maybe as many as 20 percent of evangelicals [who] are enough in play [for a Democrat]. Can he get them? Absolutely.”
Huckabee, meanwhile, still faces significant hurdles on his path to the nomination. The next big contest is New Hampshire's Jan. 8 primary, and religious conservatives make up a much smaller percentage of the electorate there than in Iowa. Romney, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani all poll better than Huckabee in the New England state.
What's more, many GOP leaders who are fiscal conservatives have feared Huckabee's emphasis on what they consider big-government solutions to some social problems. He has used some economically populist rhetoric and raised taxes as Arkansas governor several times to fund social services.
“The questions are: Can he raise money? Because he desperately, desperately needs money,” Olson said. “He also needs organization in terms of numbers on the ground. He can't just be the candidate of one faction; he has to be the candidate of the whole party.”
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