Ralph Reed’s Teavangelicals

Does the GOP slam-dunk herald a Christian conservative revival? Not so fast.

Robin Nelson/Zumapress.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


How did the tea party movement affect the outcome? It’s a question that’s been debated to death over the past 24 hours, and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed was in DC on Wednesday, bleary-eyed but jubilant, to add his two cents. Armed with post-election survey data he’d commissioned through his new Faith and Freedom Coalition, Reed declared that, yes, the tea party was a factor, but the real engine of the GOP’s blowout victory Tuesday was—wait for it—evangelical voters, most of whom co-identify as tea partiers.

At a press conference with pollster Glen Bolger from Public Opinion Strategies, Reed insisted that the largest single voting constituency was social conservatives, and they went overwhelmingly for Republicans. “The socially conservative faith-based vote was the fuel and engine of the biggest midterm victory in our history,” he said. His survey data, he said, indicates that 52 percent of self-identified tea partiers are also conservative evangelicals, while two-thirds of evangelical Christians call themselves tea party supporters. Which makes the voting trend nearly impossible to parse.

His take-home: The “tea party and evangelicals are not at odds. These movements are inextricably intertwined…Either party that ignores or opposed them does so at their peril at the ballot box.” Reed also sent a shot across the bow of his GOP brethren, warning them to “stop apologizing” for being pro-family, because far from hurting the party, evangelicals were helping to keep its candidates in office. Bolger added, incidentally, that two-thirds of the GOP pickup came in places where about two-thirds of white evangelicals live.

From all of this, Reed concludes that the evangelical movement “is in the middle stages of a fascinating evolution.” He predicted that the movement would broaden its agenda to focus more on economic issues, which, Reed noted, have a moral component. After all, he said, the old Christian Coalition helped pass welfare reform in the 1990s and tax cuts for families. “Teavangelicals” might focus on extending the Bush tax cuts, repealing health care, and cutting federal spending, he suggested.

Reed might be reading a little too much from the tea leaves, however. His data, he claimed, suggests that in 20 years, evangelicals would be an even more powerful voting bloc—what unions are to the Democratic Party, or the NRA to the GOP. “Democrats are going to have to figure out how to reach these voters,” he warned.

But other data, even from evangelical researchers, offer a different picture: that of a movement in its death throes. Not only is America becoming less religious as a whole, but younger people—the Millennials—tend to oppose the movement on key issues like gay marriage. Evidence collected by the Barna Group, a market research group catering to Christian clients, suggests that these 18- to 29-year-olds see evangelical churches’ treatment of gays as a major turnoff. Millennials will make up the nation’s single largest voting bloc by 2020, and they are a lot more liberal than the over-60 crowd that turned out in droves on Tuesday.

Reed, though, was having none of this. To my question, he dismissed research by Barna and others predicting evangelical doom. “Lots of people are falling for that,” he said. Young people may start out liberal, but once they start getting married, having babies, and paying taxes, “We got ’em,” he said.

The median age of the respondents in his post-election survey was 44, he noted, claiming evangelicals skew younger than the general population because they are families with children. Tuesday’s evangelical turnout—5 points higher than in 2006, Reed says—shows that Democratic outreach to evangelicals on issues like Sudan and climate change has probably had little effect.

Despite all the triumphant talk, Robert Jones, CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, thinks Reed should take his own numbers with a grain of salt. The methodology was flawed, Jones believes. Reed’s survey relied on election-night phone polling, which isn’t the best way to conduct a poll, because it tends to catch the low-hanging fruit—people who happen to be home on the first call, and who don’t reflect the population at large or who haven’t even voted yet. “It skews the sample,” Jones explains. One night’s worth of calls, he adds, doesn’t give you a large enough spread to get accurate results.

Reed is wrong, Jones says, to suggest that evangelicals are bringing in younger people. According to most polling data, he says, they are older than the general population, as are the tea partiers. (Less than a quarter of under-30 voters support the tea party, compared with nearly half of voters over age 60.) The teavangelicals may be the turning point of this particular midterm, but it’s going to be hard to pin the future of the GOP on a movement whose current members will mostly be dead in 20 years.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate