Ralph Reed and the Christian Vote

An interesting article and interview with Ralph Reed on The Christian Post website. A blurb is below.

The political mobilization of social conservative voters is far more extensive today than it was during the 1990s when the Christian Right helped the Republican Party take control of Congress, Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told The Christian Post in a recent interview. Reed also spoke about new fundraising efforts among social conservative groups and the Republican "civil war."

"If anything, it is far more effective and significant today by a magnitude," he explained during the Jan. 20 interview.

One of the reasons, he said, is the availability of new technologies that enable the targeting of particular types of voters by campaign professionals. Some of the same technologies used to great effect by the Barack Obama campaign in 2012 are being used by FFC and other social conservative groups.

Reed was head of the Christian Coalition in the early to mid-1990s. Under Reed's leadership, the Christian Coalition helped mobilize social conservatives. This, in turn, helped Republicans take control of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections. FFC's mobilization abilities are far more advanced than the Christian Coalition of the 1990s, he explained.

"We now have consumer databases, micro-targeting data, online data, that allows you to identify people of faith and match them up with voter files on a scale that was unthinkable in the mid-90s when I was at the Christian Coalition," he said.

Using this technology, FFC has identified over 18 million households that include about 29 million social conservative voters. When he was at Christian Coalition, Reed recalled, the group only had about six million voters identified when they were at their peak of effectiveness.

More here