PENNSYLVANIA Evangelicals gain turf for Bush, despite results

Religious conservatives favored Bush's stance on issues such as gay marriage.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- An aggressive effort in Pennsylvania to motivate evangelicals to vote this year helped Republicans achieve slight gains in the Legislature, even though President Bush lost the state, party strategists said.
The outreach was coordinated by a half-dozen well-connected evangelicals who were put on party payrolls.
Exit polling reflected why Republicans aggressively pursued their vote -- white Protestant conservatives, about 13 percent of Pennsylvania's electorate, supported Bush 13-to-1.
Narrower loss margin
They were among the most dedicated Republican voters, an army of volunteers ready to perform campaign tasks large and small. In the presidential race, they helped Bush narrow his margin of loss in the state from 2000 despite Democratic gains in registration and millions spent on voter mobilization.
"It was evident to most casual observers that we were engaging people who believe what we believe but were cheering from the bleachers. We brought many of them down to the playing field," said Mark M. Gillen, an evangelical outreach coordinator from Berks County.
Gillen, 48, also a GOP state committee member, spent the last four months of the campaign as a full-time contract employee of the Republican National Committee. Others were paid by the Bush campaign and by the Republican State Committee to coordinate with churches, pastors, Christian camps and anywhere else evangelical voters could be found.
What he did
His campaign efforts ranged from praying with churchgoers to organizing field workers and literature drops at targeted churches. Republican coordinators also advised churches on how to prevent running afoul of Internal Revenue Service prohibitions on political advocacy by nonprofit groups.
"The difference [this year] was, instead of me doing it once a week from my post, you actually have field people solely dedicated to that niche, similar to how you'd have a sportsmen's coordinator," said Josh Wilson, political director for the Pennsylvania Republican Party.
Gillen described the work as "the wedding, if you will, of civic responsibility that's taught in the Scriptures with the opportunities that presented themselves in the contemporary scene."
Many religious conservatives favored Bush's stance on issues such as gay marriage and the procedure they call partial-birth abortion. They also welcomed the president's "family-friendly tax credit" and were likely to share Republican positions on guns, Gillen said.
Those and similar issues helped Westmoreland County township commissioner Bob Regola unseat two-term Sen. Allen G. Kukovich with a hard-edged, values-centered campaign. Some Republicans are calling it the biggest electoral upset in Pennsylvania Senate history, as Kukovich's seat had been in Democratic hands since the 1930s.
Evangelical voters -- and their volunteer efforts -- were a big reason for the 5,000-vote win, said Suzanne O'Berry, Regola's campaign manager.
She came to rely on a die-hard group of about 30 evangelical volunteers to pass out fliers, make calls and do the other mundane tasks that all campaigns require.
"They were just really fired up this year," O'Berry said.
Paying evangelical leaders to serve as liaisons with that important bloc of the Republican base is only the newest manifestation of a long-standing role religious conservatives have played within the party, said Kenneth L. Eshleman, an associate professor of American government at Messiah College in Grantham.
"It seems to be a step up in what's been an older sort of relationship between conservative Republicans and conservative religious groups. It's like a formalizing of a relationship that's been there for some years, at least the last 20-plus," he said.