Why worry about evangelicals

Political Wire is running an interesting piece by an analyst of the Rothenberg Report stating that the DNC and its chairman, Howard Dean, are attempting and failing to make inroads with the evangelical community.

" The DNC statement is striking, particularly since Democratic outreach to evangelicals is on-going (including Dean's speech at Eastern University just last week) and the importance Democratic strategists have put on using the right language to appeal to evangelicals.....

Dean and the DNC simply missed the target this Easter. The press release was astonishing because it's sole purpose was to acknowledge a religious holiday, yet it was painfully-worded to avoid being religious. If this press release was part of the Democratic Party's outreach to evangelicals, they probably would have been better off just skipping it altogether."

I would prefer success over failure and competence over incompetence but I am still scratching my head as to why the DNC and national Democratic consultants are spending any significant time or resources in trying to flip the evangelical communities. This is a practical question on how to win elections by assembling a majority coalition of different individuals with disparate but interrelated identities.

Individuals who self-identify as regular service attendees have a low propensity to vote Democratic compared to other groups that Republicans win or break even. Pew notes that regular church goers in 2006 proportionally voted more Republican compared to the aggregate electorate than they did in 2002. White evanglical voters went to the GOP at a 72% rate. Comparable Democratic subgroups are African American and Jewish voters who voted Democratic by an even larger margin.

I can understand why the GOP had been seeking to expand its outreach into the African American and Latino populations as a long term investment in political viability. These electorate population subgroups, especially the Latino voting blocs, are getting proportionally larger and will continue this trend. This is the fundamental thesis behind the Emerging Democratic Majority by Ruy Texiera and John Judis. However regular service attendees and self-identified evangelical Christians are a slowly shrinking subgroup, so the long term party building rationale for placating a hostile group as part of a potential majority coalition makes far less sense for the Democrats.

I do not understand why the DNC is spending time and opportunity cost to reach out to a hostile group that is shrinking and far less likely to flip to supporting Democrats or at least substantially equalizing the DEM:GOP vote share than several other significant Republican leaning groups.