Several years ago when I attended Campaigns & Elections magazine’s multipartisan conference for political consultants and activists in Washington, D.C., I nursed a Diet Coke across from a former staffer and organizer for Arlen Specter. Specter is the former U.S. Senator for Pennsylvania who was defeated in the 2010 congressional election after switching from the Republican to the Democratic Party in 2009. Throughout his stint in the Republican Party, Specter was known as a “moderate Republican,” although he mounted a spirited defence of President Bush 41’s nomination of Clarence Thomas in the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. When the subject of evangelicals in the Republican Party came up, the former Specter staffer put it this way: “Evangelicals are our ‘Rainbow Coalition’ . . . can’t live with ‘em, can’t get elected without ‘em.” I take this as indicative of the general attitude of much of the Republican Party establishment toward their largest voting and activist bloc. The Republican establishment knows they need evangelicals, but they don’t have to like it. To recapitulate, in Chapter 9 of his From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, “Sentinels of Freedom,” Darren Dochuk gives prominence to the role of religious and, especially, evangelical conservatives in supporting “states’ rights” and opposing communism and “Rumford,” among other issues. Dochuk locates much of the opposition to Rumford and the leadership of this opposition among evangelical churches and institutions of higher education – especially, Pepperdine University and Anaheim’s Central Baptist Church. Dochuk focuses on evangelicals’ assembling support for the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Tom Olbricht asked that my look at this chapter be framed by this comment and question: Dochuk is aware that politics makes strange bedfellows and that religionists worked hand in hand with the secularists. Has Dochuk given as much credit to the secularists as they deserve in his conclusions? By way of addressing Dr. Olbricht’s question, I want to take a look at Republican movement conservatives’ understanding of how their efforts came to fruition in Ronald Reagan’s taking the White House, beginning from the Goldwater nomination campaign. Despite the title, in their Why Reagan Won?: The Conservative Movement 1964-1981 Clifton White and William Gill trace American movement conservatism from Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1943), Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948), William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951), and Russell Page 1 of 5

Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953). These they consider the seminal works that framed and gave American movement conservatism its intellectual coherence. White and Gill point to the nomination of U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona as the Republican Party's presidential candidate in 1964 as the seminal political event for American movement conservatism that laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan's winning the presidency twenty years later. Gill and White also identify what they consider the seminal principles that informed American movement conservatism at least through Mr. Reagan's presidency: 1. that belief in God is necessary to freedom and to a proper respect for our fellow man; 2. that totalitarianism, under whatever guise, must be resisted with all our strength; and 3. that the federal government interferes coercively in our everyday lives through oppressive taxes, restrictive regulations, and an increasing tendency of federal courts to dictate laws to states and communities (Why Reagan Won, 30).1 These three could be taken as definitive of what movement conservatism in the Republican Party from the late 1950s through the 1980s was about. As defined above, movement conservatism gets up a head of steam with the Goldwater nomination campaign. A career political consultant, Clifton White was the mind and the organizer behind Barry Goldwater’s nomination campaign that culminated in his defeat as the Republican nominee in the 1964 presidential election. A chapter in his Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement, “Countdown IV—California,” is instructive as to the political dynamics of nomination contest in the state between the moderate Nelson Rockefeller and the movement conservative Barry Goldwater.2 White characterizes the California campaign as a contest between money and volunteers. White estimates that the Rockefeller campaign spent between $3.5 million and $5 million in California (337). That Goldwater volunteers in California numbered 40,000 (336). White further contrasts the Rockefeller campaign’s sewing up support from moneyed Republican business and industry 1

The preceding two paragraphs, including the numbered points, are excerpted from my “Rolling the stone over the top: How Canadian conservatives can overcome the liberal hegemony.” Comment (25 Nov ’05). Found at: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/290/, January 2012. 2 F. Clifton White with William J. Gill, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1967, pp. 333-348.

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in California versus Goldwater’s highly motivated, volunteer brigade of middleclass activists (337f). White draws attention to the significance of in-migration to California from the rest of the country: It was obvious that thousands of people in every other state had connections in California, which since 1940 had drawn ten million new residents the Northeast, the South and the Midwest in the greatest of all American migrations. It would certainly do no harm for these transplanted citizens to know that there were many, many friends and kinsfolk back home supporting Barry Goldwater (346). White had urged state chairmen to push their members to send what, today, we political organizers call “FRAN” letters to their friends, relatives, associates and neighbours in California, including their Christmas card lists, telling them why they were voting for Goldwater (346). The outcome of these efforts was that Goldwater took all 86 California votes at the Republican National Convention in 1964, despite that the state was not “winner take all” (432). Checking through the index to White’s account of the Goldwater nomination campaign, I find one reference to a figure identified in Dochuk’s narrative: Billy Graham. But both references to Graham have to do with comparing the attendance figures for Goldwater campaign events to the record-setting attendance figures for Graham “crusades” in the same venues. None of the people Dochuk references, nor Pepperdine and Harding, is referenced in the White account. If evangelicals qua evangelicals or, more broadly, Christian conservatives qua Christian conservatives figured into the Goldwater campaign, one might expect White to reference it. That said, juxtaposing White’s account with Dochuk’s narrative could be taken to suggest that Christian, including evangelical, conservatives may have been activated as volunteers by the Goldwater campaign. The high motivation and investment of Goldwater volunteers in 1964 is consistent with what the former Specter staffer suggested about evangelical activists in the Republican Party of the 1990s. It’s possible that Goldwater’s core campaign messaging may have struck a chord such that it impelled Californians of a religiously conservative bent to support the Goldwater campaign. But this is conjecture, at best, grounded in Dochuk’s anecdotal evidence.

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Has Dochuk given too much credit to “religionists” and too little to secularists re the Goldwater campaign? “Hard to say.” Today, regression analysis of election campaigns routinely includes prospecting for polling data as to why people voted as they did, broken down by party, by demographic and psychographic characteristics, and by religious adherence and practice. Particularly as the role of religion has moved front and centre in electoral contests, more research has been gathered in an effort to explain it. So, Dochuk can be forgiven for drawing out anecdotal evidence in the absence of data as to the role of religion in voting and activism. But he doesn’t seem to take account of where the religious voters parked and cast their votes, nor the positioning of the Democratic and Republican parties on key issues of concern to religious voters, prior to Reagan’s election to the White House in 1980. Nor does he take adequate account of how the concerns of subsets of religious voters have shifted. Prior to Reagan, the Democratic Party was the pro-life party, and the Republican Party was not. Until Reagan, Catholic voters appear to have overwhelmingly voted Democratic. The voting patterns of Protestant voters, including evangelicals, suggests they voted roughly according to the mainstream in the region where they lived. For example, Cook County with its heavy Catholic population tended to vote Democratic, while the rest of Chicagoland – the “burbs” – tended to vote Republican. In winner-take-all states, as with Illinois with so much population concentrated in one county, as went Cook County, generally so went Illinois’s Electoral College votes. The South tended to vote consistently Democratic. The extent of the shift can be illustrated by the apportionment of the Electoral College votes from the South in 1976 and 1980. In 1976, Jimmy Carter took the votes from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Notably, only Virginia went to Gerald Ford, from the South. Carter took 297 votes and Ford took 240, nationwide. 3 In 1980, Ronald Reagan took Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. As might have been expected, Georgia went to Carter as did Maryland and next-

3

Found at: http://www.usconstitution.net/ev_1976.html, January 2012.

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door West Virginia. Nationwide, Reagan took 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s 49.4 While Carter’s Sunday school teacher, Baptist church credentials appeared to resonate with evangelicals in 1972, disenchantment with Carter in 1976 and the impetus of the “Moral Majority” likely shifted many evangelical voters to the Republican Reagan. Further, to suggest that Reagan’s landslide was due to a massive shift of evangelical voters would be to overstate their influence and to understate voters’ disillusionment with Carter’s “malaise” and their resonance with Reagan’s winsomeness, irrespective of religion. Voters cast ballots for all kinds of reasons. Many will only vote for someone who is happily married with children. Others vote based on telegenics and manner. Some vote party, no matter what. A few vote according to the position of a candidate on a discrete set of issues, as with certain “values voters” or “social conservatives” who vote for candidates publicly favouring traditional marriage and espousing a consistently pro-life position. But values voters are themselves nuanced as to who they will support. Will evangelical values voters support a Mormon to become the Republican nominee? That remains to be seen. -Russ Kuykendall

4

Found at: http://www.usconstitution.net/ev_1980.html, January 2012.

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