This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 5th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The faith of GOP presidential contenders is relevant to primary voters but the evangelical strain in

Republican politics may play a unique role in this election

Johnson. John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for

Representative Government offers his thoughts.

It's hard to remember that in the 1970s surveys showed that there wasn't any real difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party about religiously oriented voters.

It's only in the 90s that that split really becomes a big one.

So the way it works out in the primaries is that Protestant evangelicals

in particular are a significant number of primary voters, perhaps as much as two-thirds or so, and they're also, in some

primaries and they're also very active and organized. The other issue is that it begins in Iowa. Iowa caucuses are big,

caucuses by their nature reward organization and enthusiasm. So in Iowa you know a significant number of people deciding the winner will be Christian Evangelicals.

And that's interesting to me because now we're seeing the rise of Newt Gingrich and he's looking better in Iowa in the polling

but there's a bit of a fly in the ointment which is that as you may know Newt's been married three times and I think it's a matter

of public record that he was having an affair during his with his third wife during his

second marriage, which is called adultery I think and that is you know a significant problem

for a number of the evangelical voters.

So what's going on in Iowa now is that they're questioning whether or not they want to

support him, even though he seems to be attractive in other ways to them.

Newt himself has, in 2007, said to James Dobson, who is a major, major evangelical political leader, that he had asked

God for forgiveness for his previous sins. So the real issue, I think, is whether that's

going to be accepted.

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