David Brody says John McCain’s chances with evangelicals will slide further south if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee:

Let The Brody File state it here first. The McCain camp WILL have some work to do to make sure Evangelicals turn out for McCain. This is not automatic. To think that Evangelicals will naturally show up at the polls and pull the lever for McCain is a DANGEROUS assumption, especially if the nominee is Barack Obama who will make a play for Evangelicals.

Obama’s expected appeal to typically Democrat-averse evangelicals in the general election has recently become part of the conventional political wisdom. And with Obama so willing to go public about his personal faith, including his coming to Jesus, it’s little wonder. There’s only one problem: from what little polling we have, that wisdom appears to be dead wrong. Faith in Public Life’s polling from Tennessee, Missouri, and Ohio has Hillary Clinton roundly defeating Obama among white evangelicals.
Would the general election dynamic be so different as to hand Obama more of an edge among evangelicals? God-o-Meter is skeptical. One respected political reporter God-o-Meter ran into today noted that, after weeks on the campaign trial, white Southern Baptists seemed to him to be the most anti-Obama constituency in the country. He theorized that racism was at play. God-o-Meter would need to see some more polling data on evangelicals and Obama–send it if you got it–before endorsing this theory. But the expected Obama advantage among born-agains is yet to materialize.

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