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I think the many, many, MANY Rudy threads on this forum illustrate a political shift in the making. Clearly, social conservatives and the Republican Party are about to part ways. The pro-life commitment of many GOP politicians has been cynical and half-hearted at best, and now it’s no secret that the values dearest to many of us are objects of ridicule to some of the people we had considered our allies and even our leaders. The Rudybots here keep taunting us, “So where will you go? Nobody else wants you either!” But if Rudy gets the nomination, I expect some enterprising soul will come up with an option for us, if not in 2008 then soon thereafter.

....The pro-life commitment of many GOP politicians has been cynical and half-hearted at best, and now it’s no secret that the values dearest to many of us are objects of ridicule to some of the people we had considered our allies and even our leaders. The Rudybots here keep taunting us,....

I, a Rudy supporter, has supported many issues that evangelicals support (and posted tons of threads on these issues) but I continue to see that my reach is never enough. It is you who taunt and ridicule. I find it offensive too.

Holding the white Southern evangelical vote that has supported the GOP strongly over the last two decades is Giuliani's main challenge. In the 1920s, the South was as solidly Democrat as it is now largely Republican. Additionally, there were still a few living survivors of the Lost Cause, and most of the political and cultural leaders of the South were the sons or grandsons of former Confederate soldiers. To most white Southerners, the Republican Party was still the party of the hated Reconstruction era and of equal treatment of blacks at a time when the South was still under the grip of Jim Crow.

Nevertheless, when the region's dominant party decided to run Al Smith, a New Yorker of white, Catholic, working class background, who opposed Prohibition, the favored cause of evangelicals in that era, for President in 1928, there was considerable desertion from the Democratic ticket. Keep in mind that, while Smith was a conservative from a fiscal and personal standpoint, and was a man of considerable integrity, many rural Americans, both in the South and elsewhere, saw him as the epitome of the despised urban world of speakeasies, brothels, lewd entertainment, and gangsters, merely on the basis of his New York accent and mannerisms.

The desertion of the Democratic Party on the part of voters in Southern and Border states between the 1924 and 1928 Presidential elections is evident based on the chart below:


State	1924	1928

AR	61	60

KY	50	41

MD	54	42

MO	50	44

NC	58	45

OK	57	35

TN	53	46

TX	74	48

VA	67	46

WV	50	41

There have been considerable sociological changes in the South since the 1920s, including the enfranchisement of blacks, and certain states, especially Maryland and Florida, cannot be considered Border or Southern any more due to influxes of people from north of the Mason. Additionally, GOP margins in Texas and Oklahoma, as well as the Deep South, are wide enough that Giuliani could lose 10-15% of the vote to indifference and third parties yet still win. Additionally, Smith was not able to carry any states in his native Northeast except for Massachusetts. Rural and middle class urban Yankee Protestants, and in Pennsylvania, rural Scotch-Irish evangelicals and German Pietists and Lutherans and urban Episcopalians and Quakers, supported Hoover very strongly. Northeastern demographics have changed, due in part to the early tendency of white Protestants in the region to adopt birth control (white Catholics started limiting their families en masse after the 1960s), and in part to migration of blacks from the South and the Caribbean and Hispanics from Puerto Rico and other Latin American locations. Giuliani puts the entire region into play for the GOP, except, ironically, Massachusetts, the one Northeastern state Smith won in 1928.

The differences between the landscape of the 1920s and that of the 2000s notwithstanding, Giuliani and his supporters must cope with the reality that he will not do as well with white evangelical Southerners as George W. Bush did in 2000 and 2004. He will do well to staunch the losses to receive the vote level Robert Dole received in 1996.

This is the deal, we have such a low percentage of people who even vote in this country,so the last thing the republicans should do is divide the party.And when it comes down to it nobody knows for sure what a candidate is going to do because they all have paybacks to give back for all the money they took.