The Carter echo is no accident. In 1976, a born-again, evangelical, Southern Baptist, farmer-deacon vowed to cleanse a White House defiled by the villainous Richard Nixon. Pictured teaching Sunday school in Plains, Ga., kneeling in his peanut fields as a simple man of the soil, Carter promised to run a government as “decent and fair … as are the American people.”
Carter was the last Democrat to win the evangelical vote, and it put him over the top, once. Longer-term, the tactic backfired. Reawakened to politics, Southern evangelicals joined hands with antiabortion conservative Catholics in the north to help form the modern GOP. That alliance has dominated much of our politics since the Reagan years.
Biden is now trying something daring: to wrest the mantle of God from the party that claims to own Him, and to use the debacle that is Trump to cut the legs out from under the GOP. That means, above all, targeting Catholics, who are roughly one-fifth of the population and who, according to exit polls, have voted for the winner in every election since 1972, with the exception of 2000.
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