Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 4, 1993 TAG: 9303040220
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK O'KEEFE LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SURVEY: GOP GAINS ON ABORTION
The Republican Party would lose nearly one-fifth of its voters if it abandoned its opposition to abortion, says a survey released Wednesday by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.The survey provides the latest data in the struggle between GOP conservatives and moderates wrestling over the future of the party's strong anti-abortion stance. The survey does not, however, show how many voters the GOP would gain by such a shift.
"It's quite clear they're nervous; otherwise you wouldn't see this flurry of activity," said Ann Stone, national chairwoman of the Alexandria-based Republicans For Choice. "We don't have to look at a survey. We have the election results."
Stone said the National Right to Life Committee recently released its own survey predicting ominous results for the GOP if it dropped its anti-abortion stance. Nevertheless, the Republican Party's staunch opposition to abortion contributed to George Bush's poor showing in November, particularly among women, say Stone and other GOP moderates.
The Christian Coalition survey of 1,529 voters was conducted by Marketing Research Institute of Pensacola, Fla. It has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
According to the survey, if the "pro-life plank" were removed from the platform, 19 percent of all Republicans and 37 percent of regular churchgoers said they would want to leave the GOP, said Ralph E. Reed Jr., executive director of the coalition.
Stone said that even if regular churchgoers were offended by a GOP abandonment of the abortion plank, "they'll still be more comfortable with the Republican Party" on the whole.
The survey also is being used to try to put a new face on a group commonly called "the religious right," a chunk of voters that is considered by some the GOP's greatest liability and by others its most consistent asset.
Without this group, "the Republican Party would be consigned to permanent minority status. The big tent would become a pup tent," said Reed.
The survey found that self-identified evangelicals, Protestants and Roman Catholics who attend church at least twice a month make up 39 percent of all registered voters.
Of this group:
Fifty-one percent voted for George Bush, 32 percent for Bill Clinton and 18 percent for Ross Perot.
Sixty-one percent are women, half of them working outside the home.
Two-thirds have attended college.
Fifty-nine percent are in white-collar occupations.
Reed said the media have perpetuated a false stereotype. He cited a front-page Feb. 1 article in The Washington Post that described followers of television evangelists as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." The paper ran a correction the next day, saying the unattributed assertion had "no factual basis."
The group described as regular churchgoers in the survey is much larger than the constituency of the Christian Coalition, which claims 400,000 members, most of them evangelicals.
But Reed said the larger group is "who we will strive to represent as we move forward."