Iowa's Evangelicals and the 2012 Nomination

Iowa's Evangelicals and the 2012 Nomination Hugh Hewitt Columnists Washington Examiner

By: Hugh Hewitt 

Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum achieved respectable totals at the Ames straw poll, with the former Minnesota governor piling up 2,293 votes and the former Pennsylvania senator amassing 1,657 ballots.

But Rep. Michele Bachmann more than lapped them with 4,823.

(Ron Paul's votes simply do not matter in the national conversation because he is incapable of winning the Republican nomination, in essence competing against himself in his own race with its own rules. Why the Republicans allow him to use their time and space to proclaim a decidedly non-Republican radical libertarianism is astonishing. Paul is closer to Ralph Nader than he is to Ronald Reagan.)

Thus Bachmann vs. Pawlenty vs. Santorum shows a deeply divided evangelical vote, and, while the Minnesota congresswoman's win is useful to her and her fundraisers, its narrowness versus the field underscores just how unsettled the race for Iowa's evangelical activists is.

The issues of life in the womb, marriage and decency weigh heavily on a large swath of voters, hardworking, kind, churchgoing people who worry that coastal elites and unelected judges are wrenching the country into a pseudo-European civic culture that is strange, unwelcome and unrepresentative of the country at large.

Each of these three candidates speaks to this concern in different ways, but all of them find supporters among the culturally conservative.

The arrival this weekend of Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the race further shatters all the crystal balls brought by all the pundits. Perry upset some Iowa elites by declaring his own rules and timetable, but individual voters in the 2012 caucuses won't care, and Perry has a powerful appeal to the social conservatives who believe he has the courage, charisma and smarts to return their agenda to the center of the conversation.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin seems to understand that if she sits out 2012 she will forfeit the leadership of the party of faith within the Republican Party (a subparty that exists alongside and in cooperation with the party of growth and the party of national security).

If she plunges in, as more and more observers conclude she will, the values voters spread out in as many directions as mercury spilled upon a tabletop.

All of this leaves Mitt Romney a happy opponent of none of them and constant scourge of President Obama. Romney is the champion of the growth agenda, with only Herman Cain elbowing onto the space. Pawlenty had hoped to campaign in this issues terrain, but the map forced him into a battle with Bachmann and Santorum. It was a battle he admitted Sunday he could not win.

Only Perry seems positioned to make it a quick two-man race, and then only if he can consolidate the evangelicals with the Tea Party small-government activists and do it quickly -- in Iowa, in fact.

The New Hampshire-Nevada-Michigan-Florida board is set up well for the Romney campaign, and the deep urgency felt across the party to beat the president has provided the former Massachusetts governor a floor that will not crumble.

Perry may be tempted to try to wait it out until South Carolina, but that is an echo of Rudy 2008, an approach the mainstream media promises to honor but never does.

The Ames straw poll was a starting gun of sorts, and the first turn out of the gate tells us nothing except that the field is bunched. Strong debate performances or serious stumbles can quickly alter the race in Iowa, and the days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire vote will be extraordinarily important to the values voter eager to identify a champion.

Which is why the desire of the MSM to declare winners is so absurd. Ames confirmed that the Iowa electorate has a significant set of voters for whom religious belief matters a great deal.

It confirms that Mike Huckabee's win of four years ago was less about the former Arkansas governor than it was about this slice of the Hawkeye voting public and its demand to be recognized.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

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