Democrats Win Bigger Share of Religious Vote

In fact, white evangelical Protestants turned out this week as heavily as they did in 2004, making up roughly 24 percent of the electorate both times. "This is a solidly Republican voting bloc that there was reason to believe might stay home. Given the polling before the election, the amazing thing was that the Democratic swing wasn't bigger," said John C. Green, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The finger-pointing came as conservative Christians absorbed the gravity of their losses, including the defeat of congressional standard-bearers such as Rep. John N. Hostettler (R-Ind.), Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.) and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

In addition, voters in South Dakota overturned the nation's tightest abortion ban. In Missouri, they passed a measure supporting stem cell research. In Kansas, they defeated Phill Kline, an attorney general who had aggressively investigated abortion clinics.

Seven states passed constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage, but by much tighter margins than in the 11 states that adopted similar measures two years ago. In Arizona this week, voters rejected a marriage amendment, the first time gay rights advocates have beaten such an initiative anywhere in the country.

In the view of religious liberals, the results showed that wedge issues have lost some power.

"People really care about right and wrong more than right and left, and their antennae were up about corruption and the war in Iraq and kitchen-table moral issues -- health care and poverty," said Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a group that set out this year to challenge the religious right's hold on moral issues.

Kelley noted that Democrats received the support of 55 percent of Catholic voters and Republicans got 44 percent, a sharp reversal from 2004, when the GOP won a narrow majority of the Catholic vote in congressional races.

In the states where Democrats fielded candidates who were able to speak credibly about their faith, they made larger gains, according to Vanderslice, who served as a consultant to half a dozen Democratic candidates. Among her clients was Ted Strickland, a minister who won 58 percent of the Catholic vote and 51 percent of the white evangelical vote in the Ohio governor's race against Ken Blackwell, a Republican who has championed conservative Christian causes.

As they contemplated the results, religious conservatives anticipated attacks by business interests and fiscal conservatives within the GOP who think the party should focus on budget deficits and Iraq -- and put less emphasis on culture-war issues such as opposing embryonic stem cell research and keeping Terri Schiavo on life support.

David Barton, head of WallBuilders, a Texas-based evangelical group, predicted that fiscal conservatives would cite California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a model.

"They will say, 'Schwarzenegger won and won big; the guys that lost are the social conservatives -- Hostettler, Ryun.' And so there's going to be a push within the Republican caucus to move further away from social conservatives," Barton said.

Even before the election, former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) called Dobson a "bully" who diverted the GOP from its core mission as the party of small government. On Wednesday, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said the GOP needs to become "a lot more progressive and a lot less ideological."

Despite the GOP's losses, conservative religious leaders gave no indication they plan to engage in the kind of introspection and repositioning that religious liberals did two years ago. And despite their anger at congressional Republicans, they did not suggest that they were about to abandon the GOP.

"Even though a lot of Democratic candidates talked about faith, and even though a lot of them are devout people who hold similar values, they are part of a party that is liberal," said Janice Shaw Crouse, director of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, a conservative Christian think tank. "So the only hope social conservatives really have is the Republican Party."