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Republican presidential maybes woo evangelicals

Atlanta - Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have had much of the attention in these early days of the Republican race for president, but as they court the party's elite donors in private phone calls and meetings, a group of likely candidates to their right are just as eagerly chasing support among Christian evangelicals and social conservatives.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal led a prayer rally that filled the basketball arena at Louisiana State University on Saturday.

Called "The Response", organisers billed the event as a national call to pray "for a nation that has not honoured God in our success or humbly called on him in our struggles".

Retired neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson spoke and attended services this weekend at Houston's Second Baptist Church as part of the mammoth congregation's "If My People" conference, pitched as an effort to "restore the soul of America"."

Carson also appeared on Saturday, along with several other possible candidates that included Texas Senator Ted Cruz and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, before a crowd of several hundred devoted social conservatives in Iowa, where Steve King hosted his Freedom Summit. Romney and Bush did not attend.

"This is important, and it tells everybody who either is a believer or a nonbeliever what a candidate's world view is," said the Reverend Gary Moore, senior associate pastor for the Houston church that invited Carson. "Out of their world view comes everything else on every kind of issue."

Veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres, whose clients include Florida Senator Marco Rubio, another potential 2016 candidate, said social conservatives nationally amount to just "20 to 25%" of Republican primary voters. But they make up a much larger share of Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses and are significant in South Carolina's first-in-the-South primary a few weeks later.

To win the Republican nomination, a candidate must be "at least acceptable" to primary voters who identify first as social and religious conservatives.

The party also includes self-identified "Chamber of Commerce" business establishment Republicans, national security-foreign affairs hawks, tea party fiscal conservatives and libertarians. "There is obviously overlap," Ayres said. "But it's hard to quantify just where the overlap is, so no candidate can afford to be identified exclusively with one faction."

Jindal, who was raised Hindu but converted to Catholicism as a teenager, has tried recently to marry religious conservatism with a tough foreign policy. During a recent trip to Europe, Jindal drew international attention for echoing a Fox News commentator who asserted that radical Muslims have taken over some neighbourhoods in Europe, a notion for which British Prime Minister David Cameron called the commentator a "complete idiot".

Fox later apologised, but Jindal stood by his claim, telling CNN that "radical Islam is a threat to our way of life."

At a South Carolina tea party convention earlier this month, as Cruz hammered President Barack Obama's fiscal and foreign policies, he worked in details of his relationship with his minister in Houston and prayer sessions he's held with pastors in the city. And his father, the Reverend Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor, spent the entire weekend huddling with activists on his son's behalf.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Jindal, Cruz and other conservatives also tout their support for Israel, aligning themselves with evangelicals who cite the Judeo-Christian scriptural account of an ancient covenant establishing Israelites as God's "chosen people".

This week, Huckabee will visit North Carolina's First Baptist Church of Charlotte. The ticketed event, which promises to draw from neighbouring South Carolina, is built around Huckabee's new book, but his writings in God, Guns, Grits and Gravy serve as primer for the ordained Baptist minister's politics and potential campaign.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Catholic from a Democratic-leaning state, isn't a favourite among most Protestant evangelicals and made sure on Saturday to emphasise his personal opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But, he cautioned, "If you want a candidate who agrees with you 100% of the time, I'll give you a suggestion: Go home and look in the mirror. You are the only person you agree with 100% of the time," he said.

Republicans are aware that they must strike a balance between appealing to social conservatives in the primary campaign and reaching out beyond their base in the general election.

Just last week in Washington, Republican House leaders abandoned a proposal to restrict abortion after 20 weeks, popular among social conservatives for whom issues related to abortion are paramount, amid concerns that it could hurt the party with younger and female voters.


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