The important thing for our current discussion is to keep a sense of perspective on the electoral significance of the religious right. It’s a well-organized group that can play a crucial role in close elections—but it’s not large enough to give movement conservatives the ability to pursue wildly unpopular economic policies. Whites who attend church frequently have voted Republican by large margins since 1992, which wasn’t the case before. But there are two qualifications to this observation. First, a lot of this shift represents the switch of the South, a far more religious region than the rest of the country, to the GOP. Second, the divergence between the highly religious and the less devout reflects movement in both directions: The secular minded and those who wear their faith lightly have shifted toward the Democrats. That’s why whatever mobilization of religious voters has taken place hasn’t been enough to prevent white voters outside the South from trending Democratic.
Again, mobilized evangelical voters can swing close elections. Without the role of the churches, Ohio and hence the nation might have gone for Kerry in 2004. But religion doesn’t rise nearly to the level of race as an explanation of conservative political success.
Another factor needs to be brought into the mix of explanations for conservative political success: The typical voter is considerably better off than the typical family, partly because poorer citizens are less likely than the well-off to vote, partly because many lower-income residents of the United States aren’t citizens. This means that economic policies that benefit an affluent minority but hurt a majority aren’t necessarily political losers from an electoral point of view. For example, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has produced several estimates of the ultimate effect on different income classes of the Bush tax cuts, assuming that the lost revenue is made up somehow, say by cuts in social programs. One estimate assumes “lump-sum” financing—that is, each American suffers the same loss of government benefits, regardless of income. On this assumption everyone with an income below about $75,000 is a net loser. That’s about 75 percent of the population. The losses would be modest for people in the $50,000 to $75,000 range. Even so, however, the tax cuts ought to be very unpopular, since 60 percent of the population has incomes below $50,000 a year. But Census Bureau data tell us that fewer than 40 percent of voters have incomes below $50,000 a year. So maybe the tax cuts aren’t such a political loser after all.
McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal present data suggesting that the upward bias of voters’ incomes, as compared with the incomes of all U.S. residents, has increased substantially since the early 1970s. One reason may be the decline of unions, which formerly did a lot to mobilize working-class voters. Another is the rapid rise of the immigrant population, especially since 1980.[26]
Over the longer term, immigration will help undermine the political strategy of movement conservatism, for reasons I’ll explain at length in chapter 10. In brief, movement conservatives cannot simultaneously make tacitly race-based appeals to white voters and court the growing Hispanic and Asian share of the electorate. Indeed, the problems created for the GOP by the intersection of immigration and race were already manifest in the 2006 election. For the past twenty-five years, however, immigration has helped empower movement conservatism, by reducing the proportion of low-wage workers who vote.
As I pointed out in chapter 2, large-scale immigration helped sustain conservative dominance during the Long Gilded Age, by ensuring that a significant part of the low-wage workforce was disenfranchised. The end of large-scale immigration in the 1920s had the unintended consequence of producing a more fully enfranchised population, helping shift the balance to the left. But the resurgence of immigration since the 1960s—dominated by inflows of low-skilled, low-wage workers, especially from Mexico—has largely re-created Gilded Age levels of disenfranchisement. The charts in McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal suggest that immigration is a significant but not overwhelming factor in low voting by people with low income, that it’s a contributing factor to conservative success, but not the core one. The disenfranchisement effect is, however, something liberals need to think hard about when confronting questions about immigration reform.
One last, unavoidable question is the issue of fraud. To what extent does the political strategy of movement conservatism rely on winning elections by cheating? We can dismiss objections of the form “How can you suggest such a thing?” Voting fraud is an old American tradition, as I explained when describing Gilded Age politics. And movement conservatism is and always has been profoundly undemocratic. In 1957 the National Review praised Francisco Franco, who overthrew Spain’s elected government and instituted a reign of terror, as a “national hero.” In 2007 the Conservative Political Action Committee was addressed by all the major Republican presidential candidates except John McCain. After former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney spoke to the gathering, he gave a warm welcome to the next speaker, the columnist Ann Coulter,[27] who has declared that we need to “physically intimidate liberals.” Given this history there’s no reason to believe that leading figures in the movement would balk on principle at stealing elections.
In fact there’s no question that vote suppression—the use of any means available to prevent likely Democratic voters, usually African Americans, from casting legitimate ballots—has been a consistent Republican tactic since the party was taken over by movement conservatives. In 2000 Florida’s Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, conducted what the New York Times called a “massive purge of eligible voters,” disproportionately black, who were misidentified as felons. Without that purge George W. Bush would not have made it to the White House.[28] In Georgia the Republican legislature passed a voter identification law in 2005 that a team of lawyers and analysts at the Justice Department recommended rejecting because it was likely to discriminate against black voters—but the team was overruled the next day by political appointees.[29] And this was part of a broader strategy that—characteristically for movement conservatism—involved the collaboration of political appointees within the government and private-sector operations with funding from the usual sources, in this case the “American Center for Voting Rights,” which was founded by the general counsel for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and suddenly disappeared in 2007 when the firing of U.S. attorneys who refused to go along with bogus voter-fraud charges became a major scandal. Here’s how McClatchy Newspapers described the strategy:
McClatchy Newspapers has found that this election strategy was active on at least three fronts:
Tax-exempt groups such as the American Center and the Lawyers Association were deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division turned traditional voting rights enforcement upside down with legal policies that narrowed rather than protected the rights of minorities.