"Test everything; hold fast to what is good."
Following their losses in the 2012 elections, Republican officials across America have stepped up their outreach efforts to improve their standing with black voters, voters over age 65, college students, disaster victims, voters with disabilities and women voters.
“A pollster working within a campaign may face a variety of perverse incentives that compete with his ability to produce the most accurate possible results to his candidate,” Nate Silver writes. “He may worry about harming the morale of the candidate or the campaign if he delivers bad news.” Which calls to mind the biblical story of the snarky, sarcastic prophet Micaiah.
Following the re-election of President Barack Obama, there’s no shortage of helpful advice for how Republicans can improve their appeal to women, youth, black, Latino and Asian-American voters.
The Republican Party and white evangelicalism face the same problems. Both have become dominated by white male perspectives and have come to serve primarily the interests of those who share that perspective. Both have attained and maintained power by marginalizing everyone else — everyone who is not a straight, white, Christian male.
Republicans getting a jump on the 2014 congressional elections with new efforts to attract women voters, an Arizona-based outreach to Latino voters, an invitation to Muslim Americans in Florida, and new attention to minority voters in Maine.
The hucksters of the religious right are urging their followers, supporters and partisan patrons to double-down on all the same things they’ve been doing all along. They want the same stances, same agenda, same strategies, same tone — but a different result. That different result, they say, will come from doing all the very same things even harder. The true believers, on the other hand, seem to realize that more of the same approach won’t produce the results they had hoped for.
Elizabeth Drew on why long lines to vote are both “awe-inspiring and enraging;” Andre E. Johnson on doubling-down on conservative ideology; Paul Brandeis Raushenbush on good news for religion; and James W. McCarty on my brother’s keeper and “The Political Theology of Barack Obama.”
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