Freedom Writer - April 1994

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Stealth? Deception? You decide.

The Christian Coalition claims it doesn't back candidates. It claims 
it doesn't run stealth campaigns. It claims its voter guides are non-partisan. 
It claims to control massive voter blocs. Is the Christian Coalition 
telling the truth? You decide.

The following text is transcribed from a presentation by Max C. Karrer, 
M.D., at the Christian Coalition's Road to Victory conference in Washington, 
DC, last September. Dr. Karrer is the North Florida Coordinator for 
the Christian Coalition of Florida and the chairman of the finance 
committee to the board of trustees for Regent University. He also 
serves on the executive board of the Republican Party of Duvall County, 
Florida. Titled "Using Computers at the Grass Roots," the presentation 
attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

"First you select your churches. There are some churches where you 
would not necessarily find what I call Christians in the church. You 
select your evangelical churches, your renewed churches, your charismatic 
churches. You don't select your liberal, mainline denominations. If 
you select your churches right, you'll have a 90% match on voters 
who will be with us. That's what we do. 

"As an example of how this works, we had a legislative race where 
we had a female Jewish lawyer -- liberal, feminist  endorsed by NOW 
-- who had knocked out three years ago a pro-life Christian. We didn't 
know what we were doing -- they poured NARAL money in  and managed 
to beat him by 200 votes. And it was all because we didn't know what 
we were doing. 

"By this time she was the darling of the Democrats in the Florida 
legislature. They gave her all the choice committee assignments; they 
had bigger and better plans for her, and so on. And we had a fellow 
who was running for his first political office -- named Jim Fuller 
-- who jumped into the race. 

"This time we had our Christian voter data base. We had our church 
liaison committees. We had our voter guides going. And we could quietly 
-- we were not allowed to give them away, so we charged him five dollars 
-- but we printed labels for him of the Christian voters, which enabled 
him to put out directed mailings to the Christian voter, that he would 
not necessarily do to the general public.

"To make a long story short, he beat her 65% to 35% -- it was a landslide. 
And they didn't know what hit them, because  -- you want to talk about 
stealth campaigns -- it was quietly done, and they didn't realize 
they were in trouble, until it was too late.  This also convinced 
the state Republican Party that they better deal with the Christian 
Coalition, at least in Duvall County, because every candidate we got 
behind won [emphasis added], in Duvall in the '92 elections. This 
was the method we used. 

"We don't GIVE our list to anybody. What we will do is print labels 
for some people. That we WILL do -- I SOLD him the labels, I didn't 
GIVE them to him. It's legal then, see. For five dollars!

"The thing I want to say about building up a Christian data voter 
base is: political candidates, or politicians, only understand two 
things, and that's money and votes. And if they think you control 
a lot of votes, you suddenly become very powerful in their eyes. 

"Politicians in our section think we have a bigger data voter base 
than we do. But we don't change that perception, we don't tell them. 
They come to us now. When someone wants to run for office, they come 
to Christian Coalition; they want to talk to us. It gives you -- and 
not just for elections -- it gives you tremendous lobbying power with 
the legislator, because they think you have this huge bloc of voters 
that you can swing -- though you can't necessarily."

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Copyright 1995 IFAS
The Freedom Writer / ifas@crocker.com

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