My two favorite Religious Right political prognosticators – Richard Land and Ralph Reed – teamed up recently to discuss the recent election results and the exchange was pretty much what one would expect, with Reed declaring that George Allen was “smeared” by the Washington Post for his infamous “Macaca” incident and Land proclaiming that the 2006 and 2008 elections where Republicans lost were some sort of anomaly:
Reed: Jim Webb in Virginia, who narrowly defeated George Allen after he was, in my view, smeared by the Washington Post and other liberal media outlets for the alleged, you know, slur of macaca …
Land: 2006 and 2008 were aberrations. This is a return to the basic voting pattern of 2004 where white evangelicals made up 27% of all the people who voted and they voted 78% for Bush.
Reed: And we saw, as you accurately indicate, we saw a dip in the turn out of those voters and a little bit of a dip in the margin of those voters for Republican candidates.
My view is that’s because we just weren’t running the kind of candidates that they could get excited about. But if you offer a Marco Rubio, or you offer a Dan Webster, or you offer those kind of candidates, they are going to turn those voters out.
That sort of assessment must come as a real surprise to all of those right-wing candidates who lost in 2006 and 2008 like Rick Santorum who must have been one of those candidates that Religious Right voters just couldn’t get excited about.
