The 2010 Midterm election is significant in many ways. One of those ways is that it showed that the value voters still matter. Those who care about abortion. Those who favor traditional marriage. Those who believe in fiscal responsibility.
         By his own admission, Obama got a "shellacking" in the vote. And I might add it was well-deserved. There’s too much of an elitist attitude in Washington, DC these days.
         Evangelicals and conservative Catholics swung this election. They showed up. In fact, they showed up in record numbers. According to a survey by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the "largest single constituency" going to the polls last week was "self-identified evangelicals." They represented 29% of those who voted. How did they vote? 78% voted Republican.
         In addition to evangelical voters, 12% of those who voted in the mid-term were Catholics who frequently attend church.     They voted 58% Republican versus 40% for Democratic candidates. As to Catholics overall (church-goers and non-church-goers mixed together), they voted this time 53% for the Republican candidates and 45% for the Democratic ones.    What’s fascinating about the Catholic vote is the change from just two years ago. Between 2008 and last week’s election, there was an astounding 18 point shift, from liberal to conservative.
         Ralph Reed, who was the president of the Christian Coalition in its heyday (in the 1990s), founded and leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition. He said of last week’s balloting, "People of faith turned out in the highest numbers in a midterm election we have ever seen, and they made an invaluable contribution to the historic results."
         Issues like abortion, traditional marriage, and fiscal responsibility were key ones.
        Steven Ertelt, who runs the Life News website, a clearing house on the abortion issue (from a pro-life perspective), said on the day after the election, "Look no further than the health care reform bill that allows for taxpayer funding of abortions as the reason why so many pro-life candidates won elections to federal and state offices on Tuesday."
        One study on the issue of abortion found that abortion was important to 30% of those who voted. This, according to results from the conservative group, the polling companyTM inc. Pro-life candidates enjoyed a 3-to-1 advantage over their pro-choice counterparts, all things being equal. Here’s the breakdown: 22% of all voters voted pro-life. 8% of all voters voted pro-choice.
        Traditional marriage also fared well on Tuesday’s election. For example, three of the supreme court justices of Iowa were voted out. Why? Because several months ago they supposedly found "the right" for same-sex couples to marry in the Iowa constitution. These three justices were specifically, explicitly targeted by the voters for trying to force same-sex marriage by judicial fiat. Now, thankfully, they’re out of a job.
        Writer Jim Jewel summed up the values voters’ contribution to last Tuesday this way: "Exit polling showed that not only did the Republican wildfire spread throughout country but that the coalition of white evangelicals and Catholics that powered prior conservative success (before the youthful senator from Illinois split the alliance) fueled the 2010 inferno."
        Obviously, the Tea Party movement played an important role in the 2010 election. Just two years ago, the only reference to a tea party rally was in the history books, referring to the classic episode in December 1773, when colonists dressed up like Indians and cast tea in the Boston harbor to oppose an unfair tax hike. It’s interesting to note that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. mentioned that rebellious act in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. . . . In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience." Jump ahead to 2009 and 2010, where we see a new Tea Party movement impacting the outcome of the national election. Election-wise, the Tea Party movement won some and lost some. The pundits sneer at it as if it’s a net negative. Yet the amazing thing is that such a new movement, not even two years old, would have such amazing results as to propel a few candidates into prominent, national office. To wit, Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky. 52% of members of the modern Tea Party movement are self-identified evangelicals.
        Thus, the values voters made a huge difference in last week’s election. Ralph Reed said there’s a lesson for all politicians from the 2010 Midterm election: "…those who ignore or disregard social conservative voters and their issues do so at their own peril."