In terms of dissecting the things that went wrong last week for Mitt Romney (and the more sweeping conservative agenda), we have to sift through—like the man said—an embarrassment of riches. Not only is the political and social right dealing with Romney’s defeat, it is also faced with an overwhelming rejection of its agenda, including same-sex marriage, the defeat of anti-abortion candidates to the U.S. Senate, and a more progressive attitude towards the recreational use of marijuana.
The Christian Right has been a political force in America since Ronald Reagan brought them into the GOP’s tent. In recent years, that tent has come to include conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists (not the same thing, incidentally), Orthodox Jews, African-American Southern Baptists, and anti-choice Roman Catholics, among others.
As R. Albert Mohler Jr., President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Kentucky told a reporter, “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”
That rejection is reflected in demographic shifts. A Pew Survey last month found that about 20 percent of the U.S. population has no religious affiliation, and a third of American 18-to-22 year olds identify as atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular. According to exit polls conducted on Election Day by Edison Research, 70 percent of voters who claim no religious affiliation selected President Obama in the voting booth.
Another sign of the shift is that this year, progressive and moderate clergy spoke in favor liberal policy positions, including marriage equality and ObamaCare.
In addition, the Christian Right would seem to be a natural ally to the nation’s Latinos, many who embrace conservative religious values. Most Hispanics are Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestants, which faiths overwhelmingly oppose abortion rights and gay marriage. But Obama won the Latino vote by a staggering 44 percent. Rock beats scissors; immigration trumps religion.
Where does the GOP go from here? That’s a great question, and even the party mandarins are hard-pressed to decide where the fault is best laid. On CNN, after Romney’s loss to Obama, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told panelists that the Republican Party will never embrace LGBT or women’s rights.
“The big issue that Republicans are going to have to wrestle with is the Hispanic issue,” the Bush-43 spokesman said. “You’re not going to make the party pro-choice and pro-gay rights and think you’ve made the Republican Party the party that’s the popular party,” Fleischer added. “We have a party like that. It’s the Democratic Party.”
That seems to have been the Republicans’ biggest problem.