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Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, who once criticized the GOP as a “white Christian party” and also said “my religion doesn’t inform my public policy,” is building a sophisticated infrastructure to woo so-called values voters.
Dean has had the same revelation as many other Democrats since their demoralizing loss in the 2004 election: There are more people who vote because of their faith and values than Democrats realized, and Republicans have won a disproportionately large share of them.
While attention has focused recently on public displays of religious faith by the leading Democratic contenders, Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), Dean has quietly built a nationwide program.
His effort began early in 2005 when he met Leah Daughtry, an ordained Pentecostal minister who served as Democratic National Committee (DNC) chief of staff under former chairman Terry McAuliffe. They discussed the importance of faith voters, and Daughtry persuaded Dean to commission a poll of religious voters. The meeting impressed Dean enough to keep Daughtry in her job and to embark on an ambitious program to win faith-driven votes.
In 2006, the party set up pilot programs in six states to experiment with the best way to capture religiously motivated voters. The goal was not to alter policies to be more appealing. Instead, it was to emphasize that Democratic priorities, such as opposition to the war in Iraq, environmental conservation and expanded government subsidies for healthcare, were important to Democratic candidates because of their faith and values.
Daughtry said that after the 2004 election there was an acknowledgement within party headquarters that Democrats had to “change how we talk” to people who vote on the basis of deeply held values.
Democrats, Daughtry said, “need to speak more from the heart. They like to talk about nuts-and-bolts issues and not about the basis from which the legislation springs.”
The party began encouraging Democratic candidates and elected officials to talk to values voters “about what they believe in and what drives them to go into government,” said Daughtry.
In 2006, the DNC helped organize black clergy in Maryland. In Pennsylvania, it worked to mobilize Catholic voters to support the Senate campaign of Bob Casey Jr. (D). In Oregon, Democrats put funds into radio ads that defined their candidates’ values. In Alabama, Democratic leaders asked candidates to fill out questionnaires about their faith and published the answers in multi-page inserts that ran in 53 local newspapers.
“We had incredible responses from that,” said Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham, who said he has worked “extremely hard to train candidates to frame their policies and biographies in values-laden messages.”
The DNC ran similar pilot programs in Arizona and Missouri.
Senior officials say they have taken the lessons learned from those programs to train about 200 staffers who will coordinate a range of party activities nationwide in the 2008 election.
Turnham said the DNC helped him present his state party’s work in 2006 to Democratic officials from various states. Officials from West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi asked him for his religious outreach materials.
The goal is to develop a field plan for persuading religious voters to support Democrats in each of the battleground states, Daughtry said, though she declined to reveal which states.
Democrats want to “have a plan and a network where [organizers] can go and begin faith-based organizing around a particular candidate” once the party knows its likely nominee next spring, she said.
In 2004, the DNC had one staffer dedicated to mobilizing religious voters, and later transferred her to Sen. John Kerry’s (Mass.) presidential campaign before Election Day, said a party official.
Since then, the DNC has formed a faith advisory council from a group of nearly 60 “national media-trained and knowledgeable clergy, theologians and faith community leaders … who have committed to advise the party on message and policy,” according to a description provided by the party. The advisory council will hold its third meeting with party leaders in September.
The committee has also assembled a team of staff and consultants focused on religious outreach, which it will formally announce in coming weeks. DNC officials declined to reveal its size before the announcement.
The party will also soon launch a website that will serve as “an organizing tool and resource for Democrats interested in being part of faith outreach,” said one party official.
The DNC is even focusing on recruiting religious voters on college campuses. Last weekend at a convention of college Democrats in South Carolina, Democratic organizers held a “Faith Caucus meeting” with about 50 student activists from 20 states.
“Clearly, we want to support and build infrastructure for the nominee and strengthen ties for the faith community,” said Leslie Brown, the coordinator of the DNC’s Faith in Action Program. “The overall goal is to build an effort that has longevity and exists beyond the 2008 election.”
Brown said the attitude at the DNC has changed dramatically.
“I think the most significant change is there’s not an uphill battle to make the case to fund and support this initiative and to partner with the faith community,” she said.
Dean himself is also reaching out to faith communities.
In the Spring he spoke at Eastern University, a Christian school dedicated to scholarship, service and spiritual formation, and in June he spoke at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast.
“I am an active member of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Burlington, Vermont,” Dean declared during his speech at Eastern. “I worship in a church that has chosen inclusion and cultural diversity as its expression of love. It is this same diversity that is a part of my political philosophy.”
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