Rich Yeselson's "Six Points on the Midterm Elections" is worth pondering about. For example*:
My “favorite” exit polling of this election has these percentages: 78-20-26; 43-55-74. The first is the percent of white evangelical Christians who voted Republican, Democratic, and their percentage of the overall electorate. The second is the result from the rest of the electorate — in short, Democrats carried the “everybody else” cohort by a pretty good margin. But the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, more than one-quarter of the electorate made all the difference for Republicans. (The white evangelical breakdown was almost identical, by the way, in the last several elections).
To give you an idea how impressive that 26% of the electorate is: the entire polled cohort of “people of color” — blacks, Latinos, and Asians (other “of color” people voted, but too small a group to sample) — totaled 23%. The people who tell you that the Christian Right has faded are wrong. And the Republican Party will never “moderate” (whatever that means) as long as it gets over 40% of its vote from a group that is deeply reactionary (both socially and economically).
The so-called culture wars will be with us for a very long time, because the money boyz will need those right-wing fundies and the fundies want the gays back in the closet and the wimminfolk back in the kitchen. That is the bloody meat they will be thrown in exchange for the wallet brigade getting lower corporate taxes, corporate Internet**, fracking and so on. That marriage, between the fundies and the corporatists, is not made in heaven but it's still unlikely to lead to a divorce.
Ironically enough, the Republican Party must not "overreach" in what they offer to the white evangelical Christians. If abortion and same-sex marriage were actually made illegal the fundies would no longer have much of an incentive to vote for the Republicans.
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*I'm not sure if this is raw or adjusted exit poll data.
**Like always having the choice between an expensive but fast toll road or a free-but-slow gravel road full of potholes. What's wrong with that? Given the income inequality in the US (and the rest of the world), a lot is wrong with that. We don't usually privatize infrastructure, for fairly obvious reasons.