The Evangelical Surge

The guys that should have got-H ten more credit out of this election and haven’t,” notes a well-placed Hill Reaganite, “are the evangelicals. Look at Texas or North Carolina or Georgia or Pennsylvania. You’ve got to be amazed at what they did for us this year, yet no one’s noticing it.”

Take Texas. The Lone Star State went 64 to 36 per cent for Reagan, with conservative Republican Phil Gramm wiping out liberal Democrat Lloyd Doggett 59 to 41 per cent for the Senate. This Reagan/Gramm combo, aided by a solid evangelical effort, resulted in historic Republican gains in Texas. Four Democratic House seats fell to the GOP. Sheriff, constable, and county-courthouse seats went to Republicans for the first time, including some Republican Hispanics. One evangelical organization, Christian Voice, printed 2.5 million copies of voting records —600,000 of them bilingual—which hauled the liberalism of many Democratic officeholders out of the closet for the first time. The miracle victory of Republican Joe Barton in Gramm’s old yellow-dog Democratic 6th District was largely the work of Christian Voice.

JM

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John McLaughlin

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Presidential Election

The guys that should have got-H ten more credit out of this election and haven’t,” notes a well-placed Hill Reaganite, “are the evangelicals. Look at Texas or North Carolina or Georgia or Pennsylvania. You’ve got to be amazed at what they did for us this year, yet no one’s noticing it.”

Take Texas. The Lone Star State went 64 to 36 per cent for Reagan, with conservative Republican Phil Gramm wiping out liberal Democrat Lloyd Doggett 59 to 41 per cent for the Senate. This Reagan/Gramm combo, aided by a solid evangelical effort, resulted in historic Republican gains in Texas. Four Democratic House seats fell to the GOP. Sheriff, constable, and county-courthouse seats went to Republicans for the first time, including some Republican Hispanics. One evangelical organization, Christian Voice, printed 2.5 million copies of voting records —600,000 of them bilingual—which hauled the liberalism of many Democratic officeholders out of the closet for the first time. The miracle victory of Republican Joe Barton in Gramm’s old yellow-dog Democratic 6th District was largely the work of Christian Voice.