The Colorado Democratic Party staged a strategy meeting Saturday not in a soulless hotel conference room but at a seminary.
Speakers included pollsters and politicians, but also a Methodist minister and a Catholic sister. A table was stacked with new books from the religious left and “Jesus Rode a Donkey” bumper stickers.
Two years after “values voters” were credited for Republican victories, Democrats are trying to figure out how to reframe the debate around wedge issues, attach moral weight to priority issues for Democrats and discuss their own faith without coming across as insincere.
Saturday at Denver’s Iliff School of Theology, candidates and party activists took steps toward those goals during a conference one participant said never would have happened four years ago.
“We as Democrats have to learn not to ignore issues of faith,” said Colorado Democratic Party chairwoman Pat Waak. “We have to learn how to communicate – communicate, not persuade – with voters about abortion, gay marriage, immigration and other issues.”
In 2004, pollsters found 22 percent of voters identified “moral values” as the campaign’s most important issue, though subsequent research found the Iraq war and terrorism concerned voters more than gay marriage and other social issues.
Other results indicate Democrats have a religion problem. President Bush overwhelmingly carried not only white evangelicals but the most frequent churchgoers regardless of tradition. Among Catholics, Bush broke even with Democrat John Kerry, a Catholic.
Denver pollster and political consultant Rick Ridder spoke Saturday about the importance of political candidates demonstrating their values through actions, not words.
“If you’re a candidate, don’t say the word ‘values,”‘ Ridder said. “You’ve got to demonstrate the values.”
The Rev. Bill Kirton, a Methodist minister, told the audience that Democrats must engage Americans who worry about a moral crisis and believe in “something beyond ourselves.”
“Democrats wanting to be civil and inclusive have excluded those in a state of spiritual starvation,” Kirton said. “We don’t want to offend anyone.”
Nationally, Democrats have tried to make inroads with faith and values. For example, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Catholic Democrat, won in 2005 after talking about faith on Christian radio and running ads that highlighted his work as a missionary in Honduras.
Republicans have effectively used gay marriage to draw conservative voters to the polls. But Michael Brewer, public policy director of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Colorado, said domestic partnerships, like women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, can be described as interwoven with social justice and religious values, too.
“The right wing has co-opted the debate over many of these issues by claiming they have the correct interpretation of the Bible and tradition,” said Brewer, who moderated a session Saturday. “We can say, ‘We are people of faith and this is a legitimate approach to the issue.”‘
As a red state with many independents and Democratic strongholds in Denver and Boulder, Colorado is the perfect Western state for Democrats to experiment, said Laura Olson, a Clemson University political scientist.
Olson said Democrats will fail if they rewrap positions in religious language. While the party does not need to change, say, its abortion platform, it can win independents and moderate evangelicals by underlining the morality of helping the poor after Hurricane Katrina or safeguarding the environment, she said.
One risk facing Democrats is being viewed as using religion as a political strategy, which diminishes not only the candidate but the faith, said U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“If religion is an important part of your life, that comes across,” Emanuel said.
Another potential problem for Democrats: some party faithful want less, not more, religion.
“Some of the objection to the religious right is, ‘We don’t like this amount of religion in politics and we stand for secular values and keeping religion out of this kind of partisanship,”‘ said Mark Silk, director of the Leon ard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “The question for Democrats is do they want to do religion or neutralize religion.”
