The Republican-controlled state electoral commission had set up the voting districts in his state so that even though a small majority of state-wide votes usually went Democratic, there was always one Democrat Senator and one Republican---instead of two Dems. They did this by lumping all the safely-Republican districts into the ones that voted one year, and all the strongly-held Democrat districts into the next election. This meant that the Republican always won by a slight majority whereas the Democrats always got a super-majority.
This
meant that the key to winning elections was to get the Republican
nomination, and Angus had built a primary vote coalition by adding
together white nationalists, garden-variety racists, libertarians,
small-government types, and evangelical Christians into a base that
was large enough to dominate in nomination races. This was easier to
do than naive people might think---since only about 25% (maximum)
ever bothered to vote in the primaries.
O’Flaherty had put in decades to build-up his machine and it had re-elected him like clockwork for term after term. That’s why he had come to dominate the Senate Republicans and eventually the entire party. But now it was giving him hiccups. One of the nuttier leaders that had supported him over the years was starting to make a fuss, and he needed to tamp things down before they got out of control.
Pastor Ernesto Diaz didn’t have a formal title other than that of being the self-appointed head of the “Righteous Nation Ministry” or RNM. But he’d build a significant following both on-line and in bricks-and-mortar independent evangelical churchs all over O’Flaherty’s state. And the two groups had a real synergy. The boobs on line were too spread out to generally vote-in a politician in any specific district, but they were generous donors to Diaz’s ‘ministry’. And the money they gave allowed Ernesto to organize outreach campaigns that were able to unify all the independent churches that Diaz had been able to connect with. And the time and even money that he was able to commit to these small congregtions allowed him to organize them as well-oiled, very disciplined, local voting machines. The candidates that Diaz endorsed won nomination races!
But Diaz was a kook who believed that America was always meant to be Christian nation and that the government had a duty to force all atheists and adherents to another religion (plus, truth-be-told, liberal Christians too) into the status of second-class citizens. That meant mandatory Christian prayer at school, laws based on the Ten Commandments, abortion being totally illegal, refusal to accommodate any other religious observance, an end to gay rights, no more “women’s rights” legislation, etc.
In the past this hadn’t been much of a problem for O’Flaherty, because he’d always been able to keep enough distance from these folks that he never got tarred with this radical crap. That was because the base that Diaz brought in were disciplined enough to accept the notion that they had to hidden in order for their influence to work. They were patient people because they were generally outcasts in their own communities. Moreover, their own theology helped because it taught that they were a part of small “elect” or “remnant” of the faithful who were stuck in a irredeemably “fallen” world.
The problem came from the on-line community that Diaz was milking for funds. These people weren’t organized into disciplined, geographically-situated congregations. Instead, they were free-floating individuals who migrated to whatever group scratched their own particular itches. And Diaz had recently begun to learn how to motivate these folks for action. And that was a big problem!
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