1998 Ad

Christian Century, Dec 23, 1998 by John C. Green, James L. Guth, Lyman A. Kellstedt, Corwin E. Smidt

* A broader agenda. The 1998 campaign was waged on a broader set of issues than that of 1994. While the national GOP ran a highly negative and largely ineffective campaign focused on the White House scandal, the Democrats stressed education, Social Security and HMO reform and were far more persuasive--even to some conservative Christians, who cast one-quarter or more of their votes for the Democrats. Such coalition-building around a broad agenda was crucial to the most successful campaigns in both parties, allowing the Republican Bush brothers to garner at least half the Hispanic vote in Texas and Florida, and Democrat Gray Davis to cut into the GOP's prolife constituency in California.

Old fault lines were exposed after the election as both Religious Right and Republican leaders voiced some legitimate grievances with each other's performance. Christian conservatives complained about the GOP's strategic failure to produce a positive agenda, while Republican leaders faulted the right's relentless promotion of candidates who had little chance of winning, as well as its fixation on unpopular issues. The GOP's dilemma is that although Christian conservatives are the largest (and most loyal) Republican constituency and the party must have their support to succeed, they are just one of the critical voting blocs the GOP needs to win.

In some cases, GOP candidates' close association with the movement was a liability, as shown by Senate candidates Linda Smith in Washington state and Gary Hofmeister in Indiana's Tenth District. (Such problems would have intensified if Christian conservatives had succeeded in nominating candidates like Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, who unsuccessfully challenged a Republican incumbent in New York.) But the reverse is also true. Some GOP nominees, like Nancy Hollister in Ohio's Sixth and Delbert Hosemann in Mississippi's Fourth, were probably too moderate for their districts. The same conclusions apply to the Religious Right's agenda: an exclusive emphasis on social issues can hurt Republicans even in the Republican South, while careful social-issue appeals can be part of a winning platform for the GOP even in the Democratic Northeast.

The election results exacerbated longstanding divisions among Christian conservatives. Pragmatists argue that they must accommodate the party because Republican victories are required for any real progress on the profamily agenda, but purists think that accommodation means that the GOP takes their votes and ignores their views. Whatever this argument says about the differing temperaments of movement leaders, it raises vital issues of organizational effectiveness. Many Christian conservatives demand quick action on their agendas as the price of their participation in the party. Too much pragmatism undermines Religious Right activism as surely as too much purity undercuts the GOP's ballot box appeal. The 1998 aftershock bolsters the strength of the pragmatists, but the memory of 1994 still stirs the purists.