OK.
We’ll look into what is causing this.
You are not in trouble (yet). 
Cool your jets, tom. He’s NOT doing it on purpose; reply w/ quote to one of them and you’ll see what I mean. Also see ATMB.
And on preview, oops. I see you’ve worked it out.
Now that is a curious bug, only one poster can not post here but he can in a different one.
As for Bush being a born again Christian, I do think that after Reagan that that item was an important component of why he managed to be elected twice, thanks to the evangelical vote. The others after Reagan that had no strong conservative evangelical leanings were less strong at the polls.
I do suspect that the evangelical support will not be there or in a weak form if McCain or Giuliani get the nomination.
I don’t doubt that number. I just don’t think those people are “fundamentalists”. I’ve given a cite of an academic study with numbers concerning evangleicals that I think we can trust.
Again with the “fundies” thing. Did you read the link I gave about that?
And I disagree. Besides, looks like he has a certain following amont that demographic already. Evangelicals for McCain. If he runs, he’ll be able to make nice with them once the real campaigning begins.
Well, unless they weren’t voting before, I’d say it’s staying the same.
Cite?
There was an extra open quote tag in post #33. I can’t imagine why that would make the entire post invisible. The extra tag was between “election.” and “Besides” in the original quote from John Mace.
I haven’t fixed the others, as they were simply retries.
I’ll crosspost this in ATMB.
Thanks, Frank.
Glad to see I can post here again!
That was very strange. And like I said in ATMB, totally unintentional.
John, I’ll reply to you later this morning.
- They are, by definition, Biblical fundamentalists.
I read the ‘fundamentalists v. evangelicals’ link, which supported what I was saying. The other one, you only cited for the % of evangelicals, which I was (and am) willing to accept as a more reliable number.
Hey, somebody put up a website!
That definitely demonstrates a groundswell of support.
Here’s a snapshot from 1994 (subscription only):
The point being that the Religious Right’s influence was a lot less before it started taking over GOP state parties. And while I can’t find a cite, I have read in the mainstream media that they’ve taken over a lot more GOP state organizations than the ones mentioned here in the dozen years since.
Long memory. Remember, I was hanging out with these people in the early 1970s.
If you can find it, Sen. Mark Hatfield’s 1972 book Conflict and Conscience is a good snapshot of the state of play at the time. In it, he responds to born-again Christians’ extreme reluctance to dirty their hands with politics, and tries to justify to them his stance that there’s no conflict between his being a born-again Christian and a politician.
In what way did it support what you were saying? This?
Or this?
In other words there are fewer fundamentalists than evangelicals, hence less than the figure you cited.
And in how many of those states is it still true? Your cite says they are gaining control of CA. That worked out real well for them-- we’re the embryonic stem cell capital of America, with a Republican governor!
Note also the use of "evangelicals’ in your own cite, not "fundamentalists. BTW, that’s really the only issue I had with your post originally, and which starting this side discussion. It’s an incorrect statement to say that “fundamentalists” are the base of the Republican party. That’s all. I don’t dispute the important roll that evangelicals (not fundamentalists) play in the Republican party. But they’ve only been successful in nominating one of their own once. Many of them are rethinking that “success”, as the polls show.
Well, I have a long memory, too, and what you are saying might be true of “fundamentalists”, but not so much evangelicals.
How about this:
[quote]
[Fundamentalists…Have a literalist view of the Bible./quote]Rasmussen says 54% of Americans believe the Bible is literally true. That’s how you define a fundie.
There are fewer fundies than evangelicals - that is correct. However, neither is a subset of the other. Not all fundies are evangelicals; it’s just that there are a lot more non-fundie evangelicals than non-evangelical fundies.
Apparently you missed the part where I said I didn’t have a current cite. However, if you think the religious right doesn’t have control of more than, say, 10 state parties today, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
But the Rasmussen cite (that’s the one you mean, right?) referred to persons who believe the Bible is literally true, which = fundamentalists.
I’d like to see those polls. And portraying 2000 as an aberration instead of simply the point at which their power within the party got to that point is, I think, misleading.
Well, I was talking about fundamentalists, as you recall.
I’ve kinda lost track of what your point was in all this. Mine is that there are a lot of fundamentalists, evangelicals, what have you, in America. The vast majority of them are Republicans, and they are active and organized in the party. They comprise either a majority of likely GOP primary voters, or close to it. Most human beings, evangelical/fundie or not, prefer leaders who can speak our language - and the evangelical/fundie groups are even more tribal than most. Right now, none of the leading candidates on the GOP side speak evangelical/fundie very fluently at all, and the evangelical/fundie voters aren’t, by and large, strongly committed to any candidate yet. As a result, there’s a potential opening for a conservative Christian candidate to break through from the 1% or less level of support, to being a viable candidate for the nomination.
Well, I restated it in my last post, and you quoted it.
Sure. Romney is trying to be that candidate, and he’s already above 1%. He’s actively courting that vote.
I thought the official word, for whatever that’s worth, is that Jeb isn’t interested.
Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen. He’s a Mormon. Evangelicals would rather vote for a Jew. Jews are merely not-Christians, but Mormons, in their view, are false Christians.
Evangelicals vote strategically, just like everybody else, and are perfectly willing to vote for a Catholic, a Jew, or a Mormon, if he or she advocate the views that they support.
I agree that many or most voters are like this.
But if there are two candidates, both of whom share some or all views in common with the voter, is the tie-breaker the candidate’s faith? Will people even take the candidate with whom they have less in common so long as his faith seems more akin to theirs? I think they will, to a degree.
What is ATMB?
Maybe some will, but I don’t think for most voters, the religion of the candidate matters so much as his views. The religious right loved both Rick Santorum and Ernest Istook, and Santorum is Catholic and Istook is Mormon.
And Romney’s got a big problem there, too, since he was all gooey on gay rights when he was running for Massachusetts Gov. Now apparently they brainwashed 
him into it, or something.
So he’s got a Mormon problem, a gay problem, an anti-gay problem (now that he’s anti-gay), and a waffling problem.
OK, then. I’d had the impression that you were actually challenging something in my argument, rather than just complaining that I was confusing two similar but not identical groups.
I think he’s doomed to failure, for the reasons in my response to Captain Amazing.
Well, yeah, that’s what Romney’s problem really is…the fact that he ran in the past as being pro-choice and pro-gay rights, and now he’s totally changed those positions around.