THE RELIGIOUS ARE NOT THE rIGHT:

The blue states hold the keys to victory for establishment candidates: "Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney won every blue-state primary in 2008 and 2012," Cohn notes, "making it all but impossible for their more conservative challengers to win the nomination." Indeed, "Mr. Romney lost all but one red-state primary held before his principal opponent dropped out of the race"--that opponent being Rick Santorum, who a few months earlier had seemed utterly hopeless. Santorum lost his Senate seat in blue-state Pennsylvania in 2006. But in red-state presidential primaries six years later, he was formidable.

The division between blue-state and red-state Republicans by itself, however, is not enough to account for the party's seeming inability to nominate anyone to the right of Romney or McCain. There remains a mystery: in the past generation, even as the GOP has come to be viewed as more right-wing than ever, conservatives have actually fared worse in its presidential primaries. In just 16 years between 1964 and 1980, conservatives won the Republican nomination twice. In the 36 years since Reagan left office, conservatives have never won it.

There were plenty of blue-state Republicans in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, of course, and even back then the party had distinct factions of conservatives and liberals--"Rockefeller Republicans," as they were called. Why, then, did conservatives succeed in 1964 and 1980 but never again?

The answer lies in a development that appeared for the first time in 1988: the emergence of a distinct religious right or social-conservative candidate. That was Pat Robertson, who carried four states and won a little over 9 percent of the overall primary vote--behind Bob Dole's nearly 20 percent and George H.W. Bush's 68 percent. Robertson's modest campaign, however, was like a hairline crack in the foundations of the political right. Since then in every election there has been a strong social-conservative contender in the Republican contest: Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012.

The gap is filled by George W. Bush, an establishment candidate who, as a born-again Christian himself, was "a uniter, not a divider" in appealing to religious conservatives. And he left nothing to chance: his "compassionate conservatism," inspired in part by the evangelical thinker Marvin Olasky, was pitched directly to Republicans of strong religious sensibilities, and he was eager to accept whatever help Catholics like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus could provide in building interdenominational political alliances. Bush's efforts came up short in November 2000, when he failed to win the popular vote--in part, his campaign believed, because not enough churchgoers went to the polls for him. But his re-election in 2004 was widely credited to success in mobilizing "values voters."

Before 1988, religious conservatives voted with other conservatives. The religious right wasn't yet organized in 1964, but "moral" voters were a significant component of Goldwater's base, sometimes to the candidate's own embarrassment. (He vetoed the distribution a short film, "Choice," intended by his supporters to rally voters with alarming images of race, sex, and crime.) Reagan in 1980 was the first Republican hopeful, and then nominee, to benefit from effectively organized social-conservative groups like the Moral Majority. thisarticleappears copy

The development of the religious right or social conservatives as a bloc discrete from conservatives generally proved to be the undoing of the right in Republican presidential primaries. 

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