"Conservative activist courts evangelical vote for Romney" by Jo Becker |
New York Times, September 23, 2012
DULUTH, Ga. — Ralph Reed is clearly relishing his revival.
Just six years ago, the man who turned the Christian Coalition into
such a powerful political force that he was called ‘‘God’s right-hand
man’’ was all but written off, tarnished by his ties to the disgraced
lobbyist Jack Abramoff, then trounced in his campaign to become
Georgia’s lieutenant governor.
Related: Obama's Justice Delayed
But after several years in political purgatory, Reed has found his way back, and soon he plans to unleash a
sophisticated, microtargeted get-out-the-evangelical-vote operation that
he believes could nudge open a margin of victory if Romney can keep the
race close.
The other day, sitting in an office lined with framed photographs
from back in the heyday — here with President George W. Bush at a White
House Christmas party, there with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican — the
preternaturally youthful Reed, 51, propped his cowboy boots on a
coffee table and made what he admits seems an audacious prediction.
He said
record numbers of socially conservative evangelical Protestants will
turn out for the first presidential election in history without a
Protestant on the Republican ticket.
I'm smelling a steal.
‘‘God,’’ he said with a laugh, ‘‘has a sense of humor.’’
How would he know?
That may be, but Reed has a plan. And he has the money to back it up:
an estimated $10 million to $12 million from contributors across the
Republican spectrum, according to a partial list of donors and people
with direct knowledge of his operation.
Three years ago, Reed formed the Faith and Freedom Coalition and
began assembling what he calls the largest-ever database of reliably
conservative religious voters.
Good for rigging election machines.
In the coming weeks, he says, each of those 17.1 million registered
voters in 15 key states will receive three phone calls and at least
three pieces of mail. Seven million of them will get e-mail and text
messages. Two million will be visited by one of more than 5,000
volunteers. More than 25 million voter guides will be distributed in
117,000 churches.
White evangelicals are a crucial voting constituency, 26 percent of
the 2008 electorate and overwhelmingly Republican in recent presidential
cycles, exit polls show. With so few truly undecided voters left,
bumping up evangelical turnout in swing states like Colorado, Florida,
Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio would almost certainly help
Romney.
But the success of Reed’s turnout-stimulus campaign will hinge on a
variety of factors, not least whether those voters so dislike some of
President Obama’s policies that they can overcome their mistrust of
Romney’s Mormon faith and reversals on issues like abortion. And in an
election dominated by jobs and the economy, it remains an open question
whether culture-war hot buttons, like the president’s support for
same-sex marriage, will be as potent as in the past.
In 2004, Reed was an architect of an evangelical turnout apparatus
that is credited with helping Bush win reelection.
That was one of the narratives for that theft.
See: Stolen Elections (Part 2)
It's nearly the only time the exit polls were wrong.
Then came the
Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. Though Reed was not charged, the
work his consulting firm did for Abramoff’s Indian gambling clients by
opposing plans for rivals’ casinos sullied his reputation among
Christian conservatives, many of whom oppose gambling. Reed acknowledges
that he used bad judgment.
‘‘Money and power always find a way to get in the same room, and it’s
sometimes hard to resist the allure of that,’’ said Clint Austin, a
Christian lobbyist who used to work with Reed. ‘‘I want to say this with
humility because I’m not his judge, but there were so many causes for
concern, and a lot of us felt like he needed to step back and get
himself refocused. And I think that’s what he’s now done.’’
Reed began by aligning himself with Romney during the primary
campaign against Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee in
2008, said Reed’s friend Deal W. Hudson, president of the Pennsylvania
Catholics Network. Reed distributed a film, ‘‘Amendment 6,’’ that linked
the idea of religious tolerance to evangelicals’ acceptance of
Mormonism.
‘‘That movie was a great example of how Ralph works,’’ said Matt
Towery, a Georgia political analyst. ‘‘I don’t mean this pejoratively,
but he is an opportunist. He finds himself an opportunity and he hits
it, and he hits it hard.’’
With much of the work once done by party committees and campaigns now
outsourced to super PACs and other outside groups, Reed saw another
opportunity. In 2008, the Obama campaign won the turnout wars with
technology and microtargeting data made available by the growth in
online shopping. The Faith and Freedom Coalition, formed in 2009, is
Reed’s attempt to do the same on the right.
To identify religious voters most likely to vote Republican, the group used 171 data points.
Names that overlapped at least a dozen or so data points were
overlaid with voting records to yield a database with the addresses and,
in many cases, e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers of the more than
17 million faith-centric registered voters.
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