ELECTIONS 2008: ONE OF THE REASONS A DEMOCRAT SHALL WIN THE RACE FOR PRESIDENT

A political novice nudges Democrats to proclaim their religious faith
Rising political star courts evangelicals

NEW YORK: As Democrats turn toward the 2008 presidential race, a novice evangelical political operative is emerging as a rising star in the party, drawing both applause and alarm for her courtship of theological conservatives in the midterm elections.

Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice, and her two-year-old consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical Protestants and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Exit polls show that Vanderslice's candidates did 10 percentage points or so better than Democrats nationally among those voters, who make up about a third of the electorate. As a group, Democrats did little better among those voters than Senator John Kerry's campaign for president did in 2004.

"Everybody is looking at the specific steps that had value in those states, and the compass points to her and the efforts she helped lead out there," said Burns Strider, an evangelical Christian who directs religious outreach for House Democrats and was hired recently to play a similar role for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, if she runs for the Democratic nomination for president.

Vanderslice's success in 2006 marks a sharp rebound from her first campaign, in 2004. She was hired, at age 29, to direct religious outreach for Kerry in his presidential campaign and was then quickly shoved aside, a casualty of a losing battle to persuade him to speak more openly about his Catholic faith, even if it meant taking on the potentially awkward subject of his support for abortion rights.

The midterm elections were a "proof point" for arguments Vanderslice had made two years before, said Mike McCurry, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for President Bill Clinton who worked with Vanderslice on the Kerry campaign. For the Democrats, McCurry said, Vanderslice and her company "were the only ones taking systematic, methodical steps to build a religious component in the practical campaign work."

Democratic officials in several states said Vanderslice and her business partner, Eric Sapp, pushed sometimes-reluctant Democrats to speak publicly, early and in detail about the religious underpinnings of their policy views. They persuaded candidates to speak at conservative religious schools and to buy early commercials on Christian radio. They organized meetings and conference calls for candidates to speak with moderate and conservative members of the clergy.

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