Election Post-Mortem

So we face four more years of Republican leverage on everything from war to healthcare. It’s no secret that “Republican” means more right-wing religious leverage as well. Bush’s victory doesn’t bode well for people with HIV and AIDS, who are viewed with “moral” distaste by so many of the winners.

So why did the Democrats lose? Every pundit is rushing to speculate.

In my opinion, they didn’t lose just because of voting fraud or a wishy-washy message. Sure, these were contributing factors. So was the apathy that many moderate and liberal Americans continue to feel about politics. But the Democrats also lost because they haven’t found an effective way to counter illegal electioneering by religion-based nonprofits.

The day after the election, I saw a right-wing commentary complaining that Rock the Vote was “partisan” in their recruitment of Democratic youth voters, allegedly violating their IRS nonprofit status. It’s the height of hypocrisy for the Republican winners to bring this up. Why? Because the number of churches and pastors, both Catholic and Protestant, who circulated voter guides advocating that their flocks vote for Bush & Co. was probably ten times the number of liberal/Democrat instances of “partisanship.”

Indeed, right-wing church electioneering may have clinched Bush’s victory. CNN commented—accurately, I think—that the vote was driven by white men, people with incomes over $100,000 and churchgoers.

How do the right-wing church leaders get away with this illegal partisan strategy? First they create national nonprofits that do their work for them, notably the mass printing of voter guides. By the time the IRS wakes up and whacks an organization’s nonprofit status, the organization has already politicized a lot of churchgoers. The leaders just say “mox nix” and start another nonprofit.

Religious righters have played the “mox nix” game since 1979, when they launched the Moral Majority. Before then, most U.S. churches weren’t very involved in politics. As a reaction to sexual liberation, gay rights, the legalizing of abortion, and other issues, the MM was the first to register churchgoing voters, distribute voter guides, etc. The organization was a major force in getting Ronald Reagan elected.

When the IRS finally stripped the MM of its nonprofit status in 1989, its founders didn’t miss a beat—they started the Christian Coalition, which went till it was de-nonprofited in 1999. But the MM idea has multiplied like bacteria—today there are dozens of church-based national nonprofits, and they all did their “partisan” thing for the 2004 election, churning out hundreds of millions of voter guides. And they even insisted that their voter guides were “non-partisan.”

Voter guides are often distributed door-to-door and on the streets. But when they are distributed to churches, they acquire a lot of extra force with believers. When their pastor personally hands out voter guides, or recommends them from the pulpit, many believers go to the polls and do exactly what they’re told. Organizations like People for the American Way can calculate the effect of voter guides. For instance, in the 1992 elections, PFAW estimated that the Christian Coalition helped elect into office some 200 candidates in the 1992 elections.

Today church political power is rooted in churches’ freedom from taxation, which allows them to amass the enormous wealth needed to be big political players today. Though many churches apparently break the law as much as the Christian Coalition did, the IRS has been curiously loath to crack down wholesale on churches. But if the first offense would instantly cost them their nonprofit status, maybe more churches would refrain from telling their flocks how to vote.

So, if the Democrats plan to climb out of the black hole they’ve fallen into, they need to deal with this illegal electioneering that has proven to be such a powerful weapon against them. One group that fights the partisanship is Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Individual Americans need to be writing the IRS and the Federal Election Commission to demand that the government expand their crackdowns.

“But surely churches and religious organizations have a right to political opinions,” you might protest. Well, of course they have a right. But if they want to express their opinions publicly at election time, like the rest of us, they should pay taxes like the rest of us.