Folding your numbers into the election-day cross-tabs we get the following percentages showing the ballot box consequences of the evangelical vote:
% of the Evangelical Bush Vote coming from each group: - 0.10 Progressives - 0.21 Moderates - 0.44 Conservative
% of the Evangelical Dem Vote coming from each group: - 0.10 Progressives - 0.12 Moderates - 0.06 Conservative
A "persuasion voter-targetting strategy" aims to convince certain demographics or "clusters" of voters to shift their support to your candidates. I assume that Progressive Evangelicals are easier to persuade than the Conservatives.
What happens at election time if we convince the Progressive Evangelicals to go from 48% Bush to 38%, and the Moderates to go from 64% to 59% (a shift of 10% & 5% respectively)? Each of these shifts results in a 2% shift in the Evangelical vote counts from Republican to Democrat. If 2% of the Conservatives give up in disgust over Bush, that is another 2% shift, for a total of 6%.
Across the country, white evangelicals are 25% of the electorate, however this percentage is highly variable from state to state, ranging from under 15% on the West coast and Northeast, 40% in the Midwest and Southeast, and above 50% in much of the deep South. (Can't find my reference).
The upshot: small shifts in the Republican base can have a significant consequence in districts that are closely divided. In states or districts with 50% evangelical, maybe we see a 3% change. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is in line with voting shifts from 2004 to 2006.
Plus, there are other changes going on.
Well, as always, who you target depends on which campaign you're running. Someone running for Representative in a 50%+ evangelical district is in a very different place from a candidate in a 15% district, and also in a different place from a candidate for President. You are correct that small shifts can make big differences, but the question is, where is it easiest to get those small shifts, and at what cost? Pastordan argues that the smart money is with moderate Catholics, and I assume that usually he's talking about presidential campaigns or statewide campaigns in states with "average" religious profiles. At any rate, getting 3% of the population to switch their vote from R to D counts the exact same no matter who those 3% are - moderate Catholics, progressive evangelicals, or even pastafarians.
Actually, what is perhaps more important than persuasion is turnout: motivating enough of "our people" to get to the polls, such that "our people" constitute an additional 6% of the electorate, counts just as much as getting 3% of their side to switch. Now, where does that 6% come from? Partially, we need to expand the base, and partially, we need to do a better job motivating the base. That means both ideological conversion (creating new liberals, perhaps by spreading progressive theology) and better platforms, better messaging, and better GOTV.
The 2006 elections showed that it was very difficult to move the evangelical vote into the Democratic column, and I'm not entirely sure why. But my guess is that, in the short term anyway, evangelicals - whether modernist or not - are not going to help push Democrats over the edge. We'll need to persuade moderates elsewhere, expand our base, and get our base out to the polls.
Turnout and consolidation of our own is more important than converting others.
One nit. 2006 seemed to show a 4% Republican loss of evangelicals (not sure how they are defined) to the Democrats from 2004. I think the CNN exit polling is a reference for this.
