How the Christian right could defeat Rudy -- and make Hillary president

Oct. 19, 2007 | One of Rudy Giuliani's chief attractions to Republican primary voters is supposed to be electability. "We're going to need the strongest possible Republican who can win in every state," the former New York City mayor said during an August campaign stop, "and I'm the only one who can do that." Giuliani, the narrative goes, can change the electoral map of the country, taking stronghold states away from the Democrats and providing the last, best defense against the looming specter of President Hillary Clinton.

But the largest single voting bloc in the GOP is not ready for the coronation of a pro-choice candidate like Giuliani. A group of key Christian conservative leaders voted at a Sept. 29 meeting in Salt Lake City to consider supporting a socially conservative third-party candidate if Giuliani is the Republican nominee; the same group will meet in Washington on Saturday for further discussion of the third-party option. Conservative anger is real, at least for now. As longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie, who was at the first meeting, told Salon, "If Giuliani is the nominee, it will be the end of the Republican Party. There's no way that conservatives are going to continue to play the role of mistress, and here's a man who's wrong on every single social issue." Viguerie predicts disaster for a Giuliani candidacy. "In a two-way race, I think he'd be hard-pressed to get 40 percent of the vote. In a three-way race, he won't come close."

A Rasmussen poll conducted in early October seemed to confirm that a third-party conservative challenger would be devastating to the GOP. Rasmussen asked 800 likely voters about a three-way race among Giuliani, Clinton and a generic third-party candidate "backed by Christian conservative leaders." Clinton got 46 percent of the vote, Giuliani managed 30 percent, and the hypothetical third-party candidate polled 14 percent -- including 27 percent of self-identified Republican voters. The poll, and the strong feelings of conservative Christian leaders like Viguerie, raised an interesting question. Changing the electoral map means delivering enough votes in the Electoral College to win -- just how would Giuliani change the electoral map if his candidacy sparked a third-party challenge?

Early polls, especially polls taken more than a year in advance of the general election, should be taken with a pound or 10 of salt. If they were that meaningful, Howard Dean would've been the Democratic nominee in 2004, and Ross Perot would've won the 1992 election. Respondents often don't make good on their threats to back a third-party challenger. Those third-party candidates who've done best in recent history -- Perot, John Anderson -- appealed to the disaffected middle. Ralph Nader, meanwhile, had enough appeal to angry liberals in 2000 to poll as high as 7 percent, but fewer than 2 percent of voters actually followed through that November. There is also the distinct possibility that the whole third-party scenario is pure bluster, that after much harrumphing evangelicals will nix a challenger and return to the GOP fold in strength come Election Day.

Still, crunching the numbers and coloring in maps is a fun parlor game, and a fair one in light of the Giuliani campaign's own efforts in that direction. On Oct. 2, the Politico's Jonathan Martin posted PDFs of an electoral map prepared by the Giuliani campaign, which purported to show the results of a Clinton-Giuliani showdown in November 2008. The campaign's numbers, which are contradicted by independent polling, are rather ... optimistic. The Giuliani map shows Clinton taking only Washington, D.C., Vermont and Massachusetts and their 18 electoral votes, while Giuliani is just 60 electoral votes from the magic total of 270 and the rest of the country is in play.

Salon's map, based on prior voting habits and recent polling, shows something rather different. If a third-party conservative entered the race, a Giuliani candidacy really would redraw the electoral map. But that realignment would favor Clinton, not Giuliani, and make her presidency a virtual fait accompli. Here's how we did the math:

In 2004, 40 percent of all of President Bush's votes nationwide came from self-described white evangelicals. Assuming that all of the 27 percenters who told Rasmussen this month that they would vote for a third-party candidate were white evangelicals, this would mean that 67.5 percent, or roughly two-thirds, of all white evangelicals nationally who had voted for Bush would jump to the third-party candidate. (Political operatives with whom Salon spoke estimated that 80 to 90 percent of those leaving the Republican tent in such a scenario would be evangelicals. And when Salon asked Giuliani's own pollster, Ed Goeas, in May if he had any idea what percentage of Republican primary voters would not vote for a pro-choice candidate, Goeas responded, "I would say that it's probably -- hovers somewhere in the mid-to-low 20s.") Salon's method may potentially exaggerate the number of Republican losses, but Salon also did not take into account factors that might swell the ranks of defectors still further, like the current unpopularity of President Bush, recent Democratic gains in the Mountain West and local GOP scandals.

Salon then used the National Election Pool exit-poll data to determine the total number of white evangelicals casting votes in each of the states that went for Bush in 2004. We then took each state total of evangelical voters and subtracted 67.5 percent to produce a predicted Giuliani vote. In 10 out of the 31 states that voted for Bush, the consortium that conducted the exit polls did not ask voters if they considered themselves evangelical. Thus Salon made no calculations for Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming, and didn't assign them to either the Clinton or the Giuliani column.

There are 538 total electoral votes up for grabs in a presidential election; 270 are needed for victory. According to Salon's analysis, in the three-way race polled by Rasmussen, Giuliani could count on just eight states, for a total of 48 electoral votes. Clinton, meanwhile, would take 14 states away from the Republicans, giving her an extra 121 electoral votes. Making yet another assumption -- that Clinton wouldn't lose any of the states that John Kerry won in 2004 -- that would put her very comfortably over the top with a total of 373 electoral votes, a 103-vote cushion. Crucially, it would wipe out the GOP's solid South, demonstrating just how important white evangelical voters have proved to the GOP's dominance in the region that is the source of its national strength.

The 10 "red" states for which no data on evangelical voting habits was available include some, like Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia, where the GOP margin for error is slim, and others -- Alaska, Wyoming and Utah -- likely to stay red regardless. Louisiana, whose heavy population losses in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina complicate electoral predictions for that state, was also left out of the tally, but it too would probably remain red. In all, that leaves 117 electoral votes unassigned to either Giuliani or Clinton.

The Giuliani campaign might take issue with this assessment, though neither pollster Goeas nor a campaign spokeswoman responded to requests for comment. The public release of the campaign's own speculative maps, which put bright blue strongholds like California and New England in the "swing state" column, was greeted by some observers, including conservatives, with open mockery. In a post at the Corner, a National Review blog, Ramesh Ponnuru asked of the map, "Were the campaign strategists drunk when they drew it?" and linked to the blog of one Christopher Potter Stewart, who titled his post on the subject, "We're No Senior Political Strategist, But We're Calling Bullsh*t on This." The Politico's Martin was more circumspect. "This is a neat tool to fire up donors and sway activists," he wrote on his blog, "but Rudy rivals and neutral observers will find much to dispute in these projections."

Next page: "Our people at most will go pull a lever, then go home and take a shower"