Editor's note: President Bush has never made a secret of his opposition to gay marriage, but his high-profile embrace of the issue in early June was something unusual. In a weekly radio address and in a White House speech to religious leaders, Bush urged Senate passage of a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. The president's poll numbers are at an all-time low, and his party's fortunes seem shaky heading into the mid-term elections. But White House spokesman Tony Snow denied that Bush was acting out of "political expedience" and insisted he took up the issue because it was "politically ripe." In fact, the Senate measure never had any chance of reaching the necessary 67 votes. But passing the ban wasn't the point so much as stirring up the anger of religious conservatives.

Republicans have proven adept at exploiting the evangelical vote, but Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers argues that her own party writes off evangelical voters at their peril. Despite conventional wisdom claiming the reverse, Powers says, Democrats and evangelicals share common ground on many issues. Evangelicals are a fast-growing segment of the electorate, and until Democrats take them seriously, she argues, they had better get used to being the minority party.

Powers served in the Clinton Administration as Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Public Affairs. Since 2004, she has been a political analyst at Fox News, where she regularly does on-air battle with Republican opponents on issues of the day.

t hardly seems possible, but jockeying for the 2008 elections has already begun. Democrats are sizing up potential candidates, while operatives slice and dice the electorate to determine how they can cobble together a victory for the Democratic Party. And no group in the electorate seems to confound Democrats more than that called "white evangelical voters."

Making up nearly 25 percent of the electorate, this isn't a group that can be ignored, especially in an era of a polarized electorate that continues to produce nail biter presidential elections. Winning even a fraction more of evangelical voters could swing Democrats into the winning column.

But aren't they all part of the Religious Right? Not so fast. It's true that in 2004, 78 percent of evangelicals cast their vote for George W. Bush. But evangelicals didn't always line up behind the GOP. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1987 white evangelicals were almost evenly divided between the two parties. But by 2004, Republicans dominated, with 56 percent versus 27 percent for Democrats. As Bill Moyers has stated: "They hijacked Jesus."

Today, many evangelical leaders believe that a growing number of evangelical voters are prepared to return to the Democratic fold, but only if Democrats stop misunderstanding, neglecting, and even intentionally ignoring what once was and should be a natural constituency.

Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, travels the country talking to students and evangelical leaders. He estimates that about half of evangelicals belong to the immovable Religious Right, but the other half are open to, if not hungry for, progressive leadership.

THE RELIGIOUS LEFT—In a May 23 Op-Ed about wooing evangelical voters, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus raised a question that is on the minds of many Democrats: "What does it profit a party to gain a demographic but lose its soul?" She neatly summarized the worry that the only way for progressives to win over evangelical voters would be to jettison core Democratic values. But let's be clear: this would be no deal with the devil.

When many people hear the word "evangelical," what leaps to mind is Jerry Falwell blaming gays and feminists for 9/11 or Jimmy Swaggart saying that he would kill any man who looked at him romantically. But these kinds of comments by evangelical ministers are likely to be as shocking to evangelicals as they are to you.

When Falwell says of Jimmy Carter: "His message of peace and reconciliation under almost all circumstances is simply incompatible with Christian teachings as I interpret them," the evangelicals who opposed the war in Iraq might disagree. In fact, some 40 faculty members from the Fuller Theological Seminary—the largest evangelical seminary in the country—signed a September 2002 letter opposing Bush's idea of waging a unilateral pre-emptive war in Iraq.