There were, I think, a lot of reasons for it. But unless I'm completely tone deaf, this had nothing to do with it:
Republicans have also whipped up a storm of opposition among middle-of-the-road voters on social issues. The religious right's opposition to abortion has always been an electoral liability: only 30% of voters favour overturning Roe v Wade. But in the past few years social conservatives tested people's patience still further over a federal marriage amendment and Terri Schiavo. Fully 72% of Republican voters opposed the Republicans' attempt to use the might of the federal government to keep the severely brain-damaged woman alive. The voters got their revenge in the 2006 mid-term elections—“bloody Tuesday” in the words of Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group. Rick Santorum, once the religious right's most prominent champion in the Senate, barely scraped 41% of the vote in Pennsylvania. Ken Blackwell, social conservatism's most prominent black champion, went down to a humiliating defeat in the race for the Ohio governorship. Social conservatives lost ballot initiatives on everything from abortion to gay marriage.
As far as I can tell there's not a single iota of evidence out there that the 2006 Democratic landslide that had anything at all to do with Schiavo or right-wing abortion ideas. Broadly speaking, a socially conservative Republican was safer in November than a socially liberal one. And while some social conservatives lost last year and Roe is still the law of the land, the explanation is emphatically not that the Christian right is weaker than it was in, oh, 2004.
Via.
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