Voting and the Evangelical Right
WOODRUFF: A bit of an interesting, if not remarkable, development out on the campaign trail: Vice President Cheney talking to voters -- to supporters in Iowa today, warning Americans that voting for John Kerry makes it more likely that the United States will face a terrorist attack. And just quoting, he said -- the vice president said, "It is absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again. And we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." Again this, is Vice President Cheney speaking to a group of supporters in Des Moines, Iowa. Already, the Kerry campaign -- Kerry/Edwards' campaign has come back with a brief comment rejecting the vice president's words as, quote, "scare tactics that cross the line." I'm sure that we'll be hearing more about what the vice president had to say. Well, Meantime, Chuck Todd is with me now to talk about the role of evangelical Christians in the race for the White House. You might say a tamer subject than what we just discussed.</s>CHUCK TODD, EDITOR, "THE HOTLINE": Who knew it would be tamer? Yes.</s>WOODRUFF: Who knew? All right, first of all, Chuck, let's talk about this: How many voters identify themselves as members of the religious right?</s>TODD: Well, that's the hardest part of this thing, because it's not clear what the best description is. For the last three or four political cycles, pollsters have identified this group as religious right. So, that's the data we have in 2000. Fourteen percent of the electorate identified themselves as religious right. In 1996, 17 percent identified themselves as members of the religious right. It was that downturn in that self-identification that had Karl Rove take a second look at these returns and basically claim that one of the reasons why they lost the popular vote is somehow evangelicals -- or self-described members of the religious right -- didn't turn out in the same numbers that they turned out before. If you extrapolate it out and had they, it would have netted another 300,000 votes. So, statistically, Karl Rove's theory does play itself out between '96 and 2000.</s>WOODRUFF: All right, I know you've looked at this across the country and particularly in the battleground states. When do you see the vote making a difference?</s>TODD: Well, there's three states where there was gigantic drop off in the religious right vote between '96 and 2000: Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia. Now, all three were states that Bush carried, but they saw dramatic decreases in the members describing themselves in the religious right. All three of those states are considered battlegrounds -- North Carolina and Virginia, for instance, moving a little bit toward the Democrats and how it's been growing. It's still a lean-Bush state. Missouri is sort of growing away, but its performance among the religious right in the base part of these states that the Bush campaign's counting on to make sure they don't slip away. Conversely in 2000 in Michigan, for instance, the Republicans did get an increase in the evangelical vote from '96, and yet Gore won by a big margin. So, Rove talks about how much this religious right vote is important to him, but it's hard to find the statistical evidence, because where the increases could occur are in states that he already controls, and where they might not occur are states that they've already lost.</s>WOODRUFF: Well, by necessity, you're relying on exit polls in 2000. How easy is it for the campaigns to know where these voters are and how many there are?</s>TODD: Well, what they've done -- it's not easy, because it's not easy to identify them. Do people not like the term religious right? Is evangelical Christian better? That's a problem. So, instead, the campaigns have taken this to the churches, and there are some very -- there's a huge voter registration program among evangelicals. James Dobson of Focus on the Family just teamed up with ivotevalues.com, an evangelical Christian voter registration site. They have a bunch of dos and don'ts about what they can legally say from the pulpit -- some things that they've never done before. So, it's getting the churches themselves and these evangelical Christians to get more politically active from the pulpit inside, and that's the assumption of how it increases turnout. But again, statistically, very hard to see how it could move numbers and actually swing states. We could see how it can move popular vote numbers, but maybe not as many states as we think.</s>WOODRUFF: All right. Chuck Todd -- I should have said, of course, he's editor of "The Hotline," and we know that is an insiders political briefing, produced every day by the "National Journal." Chuck, thanks very much.</s>TODD: Thanks, Judy.</s>WOODRUFF: Still to come on INSIDE POLITICS, a John Kerry supporter cannot hide her excitement as the Democrat nominee campaigns in North Carolina. Details on a hot exchange when we return.