Ralph Reed: White evangelical turnout better than 2004

Another 2012 loser. Prior to the election, Greg Dworkin and I were having a chat about implications of white evangelicals doing better at the polls than they did in 2004. Greg noted that Ralph Reed, white evangelical huckster plenipotentiary, would be in big trouble if they didn't duplicate their performance of 2004. Well, they did even better than 2004 and they still lost.

You need no better proof than Ralph Reed himself:

A national post-election survey commissioned by the Faith and Freedom Coalition last night found that the evangelical vote increased in 2012 to a record 27% of the electorate and that white evangelicals voted roughly 78% for Mitt Romney to 21% for Barack Obama.  This was the highest share of the vote in modern political history for evangelicals, Reed said.

'Evangelicals turned out in record numbers and voted as heavily for Mitt Romney yesterday as they did for George W. Bush in 2004,' Reed observed. 'That is an astonishing outcome that few would have predicted even a few months ago.  But Romney underperformed with younger voters and minorities and that in the end made the difference for Obama.'

Republicans cannot use the excuse that their base voters didn't turn out for this election as they did in 2008. White evangelical conservatives did turn out exactly as they said they would over and over again this election cycle. The problem for Republicans is there are not enough of them to win a national election anymore. At least not in the states that count. Detroit isn't bankrupt, but the 'Southern Strategy' is.