Palin and the Fertile Crescent (Bachmann's Catholic/Libertarianism Problem)

by Brices Crossroads

As I have written before, the election will be decided along a large swath of states beginning with Pennsylvania in the East and extending West and North across the upper Midwest to Iowa. I dub these states the "fertile crescent" because they will award seventy electoral votes in 2012. These states,Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa are as important to Barack Obama's reelection as are Texas and Florida to the GOP candidate. Together with a handful of small Western states, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado (and perhaps New Hampshire in the East), these states represent the only true swing states in the election, assuming Florida returns to its GOP roots, a likely proposition given the 2010 GOP blowout there.

The six states of the fertile crescent should be uncharacteristically friendly to the GOP this year. Barack Obama won 43% of the white vote in 2008, the largest percentage for a Democrat non-incumbent since Jimmy Carter in 1976. However, his job approval among whites has been consistently, according to Gallup daily tracking poll, in the 37-38% range for the last year. Ominously, the Democrat share of the white vote (which is roughly 75-77% of the electorate) in the 2010 election was 37%. One might expect that Obama's prospects in the fertile crescent states, where the white vote is on average 85% would be even more imperiled. And they should be. But will it be? Well, that depends on who the GOP nominates.

The choice for conservatives seems to be narrowing to one of two--Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. I myself have grave doubts about whether Bachmann can even be nominated, and that if she emerges as the conservative alternative in Iowa, it will merely ensure the nomination of the Establishment candidate, Mitt Romney. But there are no doubt some conservatives of good will who believe she can be nominated and are supporting her based upon this belief. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that they are right and that Bachmann becomes the GOP nominee. How would Bachmann's nomination affect the GOP strategy to deny Obama reelection by denying him the fertile crescent? After all, Obama's approval numbers among white voters are abysmal and those six states have among the "whitest" electorates in the United States. Won't that translate into a Bachmann sweep? Well, not exactly.

The white voters in the fertile crescent are different from generic white voters nationally in two important ways. First, a far greater proportion of those voters are Catholic than the national average of 22%. Second, a higher proportion of the voters there are irreligious or claim no religion. The GOP voters contained within this group would be libertarians, economic conservatives and the like. They will make common cause with us against the overbearing federal leviathan, but they are wary of anyone who could be perceived as shoving a particular religious viewpoint down their throats. Reagan was the last (and really only) politician to be able to fuse the social conservatives with the economic conservatives, since both groups trusted him.

How do these dynamics affect Bachmann's prospects in these six states? Let's look at two. The first is a state without which no Democrat has won the Presidency since Harry Truman nearly 65 years ago. It is safe to say that, if Barack Obama loses this state, he will be packing his bags in January 2013. The state went deep red in 2010, electing nearly half dozen GOP Congressmen, a conservative GOP U.S. Senator and a new GOP Governor. It is a ripe GOP target in 2012 with the right candidate. The state of which I speak is the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes.

Pennsylvania's electorate is between 85% and 90% white, slightly higher than the average of the six states. It is however far and away the most Catholic of the six, with 53% of its population adhering to the Catholic faith. Until just six days before her Presidential announcement in June, Bachmann belonged to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a denomination which unabashedly proclaims on its website:

``We identify the anti-Christ as the papacy. This is an historical judgment based on Scripture.’’

If Bachmann becomes the GOP nominee in 2012, the hill which the GOP must climb in the Keystone state will turn into Mount Everest. She will have a Jeremiah Wright problem, and unlike that scandal in 2008, which was ignored by the Lamestream media and John McCain alike, this one will be front and center throughout the election. And her problem with the Catholic vote has another, and different dimension, from the Jeremiah Wright episode. Wright's racist comments against white people were aimed not at a minority, but at the majority of Americans. That majority was confident enough that it could select an African American as President with no fear that there would be any racial repercussions. Catholics, on the other hand, are a minority, albeit a large one (comprising about 25% of the national electorate). The Church is embattled and under fierce attack, generally from the leftist, secular media. It has had an alliance with Evangelicals, but an uneasy one, and there is a history in other parts of the country, in the not too distant past, of discrimination against Catholics. Publicly expressed comments such as those by Bachmann's Church rip the scab off old wounds.

And Bachmann's problems in Pennsylvania do not begin or end with Catholic voters. In addition to the 53% of its electorate which is Catholic, fully 15% of the electorate there expresses no preference for any religion or is irreligious. This is typical for the states in the region and is much higher than the South, for example. These irreligious voters, the GOP leaning portion of which is likely libertarian, tend to be uncomfortable with government sponsored religious endeavors such as Marcus Bachmann's "de-gaying" clinic which receives medicaid and other government subsidies.

There is a voting demographic in Pennsylvania which is neither Catholic nor irreligious...the black vote. It comprises 10% of the population. However, it is completely beyond the reach of Michele Bachmann or any GOP candidate. I mention it only to make the point that, even at this early stage of the campaign, fully 78% of the electorate in Pennsylvania would be alienated from Bachmann or is out of reach for her completely. In the unlikely event that Michele Bachmann were the nominee, Barack Obama--who is gravely imperiled in Pennsylvania at present--could tuck its 20 electoral votes into his pocket and expend his resources on Florida and Ohio.

The other state on which I focus, Ohio, is even more crucial to GOP prospects than is Pennsylvania to the Democrats. No GOP candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio. Its Catholic vote is large, 24%, Its irreligious demographic is, at 17%, the largest of the six states. 12% of its electorate is African American. By my calculations, then, Michele Bachmann's handicap in the "do or die" Buckeye state stands at a virtually insurmountable 53%. It is not that different in the other four states of the fertile crescent or in the western swing states or New Hampshire (where it is 64%).

And what of Sarah Palin? How would she fare along the wide expanse of the fertile crescent? Palin is herself an Evangelical but, as a former Catholic whose parents area also former Catholics, she does not frighten Catholic voters. I have heard her speak fondly of her Irish Catholic grandmother and her devotions. Like Ronald Reagan, whose father was Catholic, she has a cultural affinity for Catholics which Bachmann conspicuously lacks.

As a western governor, Palin's main raison d'etre was to get government out of the private lives of the citizenry as well as their pocketbooks. Ardently prolife, it is hard to see her embracing an enterprise like Bachmann's de-gaying clinic and even harder to see her approving government subsidies for such a caper. This is one reason among many why economic conservatives, CATO institute and Club for Growth aficionados, as well as libertarians, feel comfortable with Palin but are leery about the Bachmanns and the Huckabees.

Sarah Palin is lone candidate who, as the GOP nominee, can reassemble and energize, the old Reagan coalition of social conservatives---evangelical Christians and culturally conservative Catholics--and fuse it with the more secular, libertarian and economic conservatives. Bachmann's improbable nomination would fracture it, driving a wedge between Catholics and evangelicals, shearing off the libertarians from the economic wing of the coalition and giving Obama another four year lease on power.

The conclusion is inescapable. Michele Bachmann's improbable nomination would at a stroke alienate two huge and vital demographics--Catholics and libertarians--and would generate an electoral bloodbath and down ballot catastrophe of epic proportions. For this reasons among many others (executive experience being one) she will not be the nominee. The GOP may be the stupid party. It is not the suicide party.