Obama making 'inroads' with young evangelicals
Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 7/8/2008 9:25:00 AM
Mark DeMoss is a former Mitt Romney adviser and president of The DeMoss Group, a public relations firm that works with evangelical groups. He says he would not be surprised if Senator Obama garnered as much as 40 percent of the evangelical vote in November, given that Bill Clinton received a third of the evangelical vote when he won reelection in 1996.
"The appeal that Barack Obama had apparently to millions of new voters and people from basically every segment of society who were attracted to his campaign for one reason or another, I would say evangelicals have not been exempted from that," he points out. Obama's outreach to younger evangelicals, tentatively called "Joshua Generation," includes a thousand house partices and dozens of Christian rock concerts.
He also notes that reports indicate many evangelicals are concerned about the environment, poverty, and criminal justice reform – issues that have not been front-burner issues, historically speaking, for that voting bloc.
But Demoss says he did not mention the 40 percent statistic to show his affinity for Barack Obama, rather to warn the McCain campaign not to take evangelicals for granted.
