Some well-informed people — Rupert Murdoch among them — have suggested that Mitt Romney could exploit Obama’s increasingly fractious relationship with America’s Catholics to win the presidential elections in November. The so-called ‘Catholic vote’ is often said to be the crucial swing factor in American democracy.
Romney, however, may be facing a bigger socio-religious stumbling block than Obama’s: evangelicals. They don’t like him. Mainstream Protestant Republicans in the north have plumped for Mitt, generally speaking, but he has been far less successful in the evangelical south. ‘As a county’s evangelical population expands,’ says Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende, ‘Romney’s vote share declines.’
The obvious explanation is that southern Baptists and born-again Christians are hostile to Romney because he is a Mormon. But it is probably something broader: Romney is also a rich northerner who is notorious for contradicting himself on matters such as gay marriage — hardly a recipe for popularity within the Bible belt.
Some Republican strategists will look favourably on Romney’s lack of appeal for the religious right. It could mean that, assuming he gets the nomination (and the evangelicals still might prevent him), he will be able to occupy the hallowed centre ground in November. The idea is that no matter how much the southern faithful dislike Mitt, they will never turn to Obama. And Romney has reportedly performed well with Hispanic (Catholic and Protestant) voters, who are always thought to be the key ‘demographic’ in swing states.
But election analysts aren’t always right, and there are more and more indications that the Republican base — the tea partiers among them — are so fed up with supposedly conservative candidates cynically ‘running to the centre’ at election time that they are abandoning the GOP altogether. So before Romney thinks about reaching out to Catholics, Latinos and the middle-ground, he might be well-advised to address his unpopularity with the Evangelical God Squad.
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