In recent years, when Pat Robertson has said something outrageous, a number of conservatives have distanced themselves from him, saying he’s old, out-of-touch, washed-up, and nobody listens to him any more. In August 2005, when he suggested that the U.S. government assassinate Hugo Chavez, I tried to get a sense of how influential Robertson still is. And the answer, at least then, was, he’s still fairly influential:

To many on the right, Robertson’s most important role today seems to be as the maker of those crackpot comments, which give liberals the opportunity to hang the offending words—and Robertson himself—around conservatives’ necks.
There is some truth to that, but there is also some evidence to suggest that Robertson is not quite as marginalized a figure as conservatives would like to believe. His main forum, the television program The 700 Club, is available in nearly all of the country on the ABC Family Channel, FamilyNet, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and some broadcast stations. According to Nielsen Media Research, The 700 Club, aired each weekday, has averaged 863,000 viewers in the last year. While that is not enough to call it a popular program, it is still a significant audience. It is, for example, more than the average primetime audience for CNN last month—713,000 viewers—or MSNBC, which averaged 280,000 viewers in prime time. It is also greater than the viewership of CNBC and Headline News.
“It’s a pretty good audience,” says John Green, a professor at the University of Akron who is also a fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “He is certainly a consequential figure.” But Green and others point out that, even though Robertson has a core audience of supporters, his influence—which had a high point in 1988 and 1989, when he ran for president and founded the Christian Coalition—is unquestionably on the wane. Figures like James Dobson have eclipsed Robertson in political influence, and popular evangelicals like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen have surpassed him in the religious world. “They are more in tune with contemporary culture, while Robertson was more in tune with what was happening with evangelicals 20 or 30 years ago,” says Green.

The interesting thing in light of today’s events is that some of the conservatives who would marginalize Robertson are the types who would support Giuliani, and some who might support Robertson, or at least not condemn him, are the types who would oppose Giuliani.