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DALLAS – After the recently organized church, Emily Mooney smiled as she told her friends about her public act of rebellion. She had affixed a "Beto for the Senate" sticker on her S.U.V. and took him to the evangelical church of his family.
But then, through the parking lot, deep in Texas, a conservative biblical belt, she saw a sign: the exact same sticker that supported Beto O'Rourke, the Democrat who defies Senator Ted Cruz.
"I was like, who is it?" S & # 39; she exclaimed. "Who in this church does that?"
Listening to Ms. Mooney's story, the other four evangelical mothers around an island kitchen began to vibrate. All go to similar conservative churches in Dallas. All are long-time Republican voters, solely because they oppose the right to abortion. Only one group broke ranks to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in November, they all decided to vote for Mr. O'Rourke, the Democratic candidate who is on the front line of trying to overthrow the political in Texas of a deep red.
In the race for the Senate, one of the most unexpected in the country, any small change among evangelical voters – a stable base for Republicans – could be a significant loss for Mr. Cruz who, like President Trump, has makes white evangelicals the bulwark of his support.
For the country's Democrats, who have largely rejected white evangelical voters, this also indicates – not only for the mid-term elections but also for the 2020 presidential campaign – that there are religious and female voters open to some candidates from their party.
The women, all in their 30s, described Mr. O. Rourke as a blatant moral contrast to Mr. Trump, whose politics and behavior they regard as fundamentally anti-Christian, especially separating children from school children. immigrants from their parents at the border, ban many Muslim refugees and disrespectful women.
"I care as much about the babies on the border as babies in the womb," said Tess Clarke, a friend of Ms. Mooney, confessing that she was "mortified" by the way she was voting because she had only considered abortion policy. "We slept. Now we woke up. "
Mrs. Clarke, who sells lighted candles by refugee women in Dallas, began crying while remembering to visit a migrant woman detained and separated from her daughter at the border. When an older white evangelical man recently told her that she could not be a Christian and vote for Mr. O'Rourke, Ms. Clarke was outraged.
"I always come back to who Jesus was when he walked on the earth," she said. "It's about the proximity of the people who are suffering."
The influence of voters like Mrs. Clarke and her friends in the Senate race is unclear. Texas remains a deeply conservative state. According to the Pew Research Center, a Texan is evangelical and 85 percent of white evangelical voters in Texas supported Trump in 2016, which is above the national average, which was a record for a presidential election. Republican strategists reject the idea that their Texas base shows signs of cracking.
"It's not disturbing at all. It would be an anomaly, "said Chris Wilson, strategist of Mr. Cruz, citing data from his company showing that Mr. Cruz led Mr. O'Rourke between 87% and 11% among evangelical activist voters.
The Upshot section of the New York Times was created Race polls, and most opinion polls show that Mr. Cruz holds a small lead.
Still, Ms. Mooney and her friends may represent a discreet network of white evangelical women in Texas, whose vote in November could be more lucrative than ever before. They are angry with many of Mr. Trump's policies and frustrated because they believe their faith has been turned into weapons to support his program.
Sarah Damoff, a court-appointed special advocate for children, voted unequivocally after Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania doctor, was indicted in 2011 for the murder of live-born babies, victims of botched abortions. But she was moved to see Mr. O'Rourke sitting with migrant women separated from their children and thinking about his own vulnerability as he grew up with a blind single mother.
"How does my vote represent the little girl I used? be? "she said." Republicans were once the party of family, morals and values, and now they are not. "
Kelsey Hency, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary, explained how she had adopted a black child while Mr. Trump was sweeping the Republican primaries and realized how much she needed to learn about the race. "It brought the torrent of everything else," she said. "When I look at Cruz, I think he sees republican politics. When I look at Beto, I think he sees vulnerable people who need to be supported. "
Women were particularly frustrated by pastors in their own backyard, like Robert Jeffress, who runs the first neighboring Baptist, Dallas, and is one of Trump's most outspoken proponents.
"You're doing so much damage," said Sarah Bailey, as if Mr. Jeffress was in the room.
"He's a pastor, so I should identify with what he says," Bailey said. "That's how I grew up. For me, it was finally to know that it was O.K. push back. "
Sometimes, however, their support is silenced. Some of their other friends who support Mr. O'Rourke are married to men who support Mr. Cruz and have refused to let them speak publicly. A friend said she wanted to protect her marriage and feared that she would be "crucified, burned at the stake" if people found out, said Ms. Clarke.
"My hope would be for women in similar places to ours to feel liberated from the expectation that you are doing the same thing you have always done, because that is for sure, because that is what your pastor tells you to do, or your husband, "said Mrs. Clarke." We must own it. "
Unlike many other Democratic candidates before the mid-term elections, O'Rourke is pursuing a strategic, albeit limited, action with white evangelicals, particularly women. While attending his concert with Willie Nelson in Austin recently, he recorded a podcast segment with Jen Hatmaker, a Christian author whose famous show "For the Love" is followed by tens of thousands of evangelical women. The episode is scheduled to air on Thursday.
O'Rourke is expected to join a group of progressive Christians who are urging evangelicals to vote for Democrats at a rally in the Houston area this month, one of the group's six stops in Texas to support him.
In an interview last week, Mr. O'Rourke said he wanted everyone to find a place in his campaign, regardless of his political party, and that he listened to the Conservatives.
Texas has the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies in the country, he said. When family planning clinics close, some women lose the opportunity to see a provider or access cervical cancer screening.
"We recognize that, regardless of the problem, people can draw different conclusions and that this should in no way exclude them from their ability to work together on other issues they might be interested in. ", did he declare. "There are more things in common than we could know."
In Ms. Hatmaker's show, Mr. O'Rourke spoke about the American value of compromise. "If we allow the perfect to become the enemy of good, we will never go anywhere," he said.
Ms. Hatmaker said that many evangelicals "are thirsty for new leadership."
"Her ideas are in my ears, as I understand the faith, very fundamentally Christian," she said in a phone interview from her home in Austin.
Hatmaker made the headlines two years ago by publicly supporting gay marriage, urging evangelical bookstores to bring her books out of their shelves. She also denounced Mr. Trump.
"The whole notion of the evangelical elector is fatally flawed," she said, listing a series of important issues for women in her community, such as the end of white supremacy and the culture of women. sexual assault. "What I hope for Ted Cruz, is that he is paying attention to an opponent who has managed to capture the collective imagination of Texas in a state where our vote is vested in ################################################## 39; advance. "
According to Hatmaker, these evangelical women may seem invisible, but they dot the state and reflect a more general discontent on the part of some Christian conservatives that their faith has been politicized for what they see as an agenda opposite to what Jesus represents.
The Texas church is becoming a testing ground for the future of the evangelical voice in politics and for evangelicals who oppose the impetus of the new religious right. Beth Moore, an influential author and Houston-based Christian teacher, signed a letter urging Congress and Mr. Trump to protect dreamers and reunite immigrant families. After the Senate confirmed Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court, she tweeted close to a million followers not to lose heart.
Some evangelical pastors in the country have felt torn about Mr. Trump since his rise. many support Republican positions on issues such as abortion and Israel, but are repelled by the racism and sexism they see in its politics. In Texas, since the election of 2016, the black devotees left the white churches and some white evangelical women walked away from Mr. Trump on tiptoe.
Mr. O'Rourke's attraction is more thematic than structural, and Democrats more generally can regard white evangelicals as inaccessible. Spending money to win evangelical voters is not a priority, as much as trying to convince people who voted for Mrs. Clinton, says Jason Stanford, former Democratic strategist in Texas.
"It would be unlikely that an evangelical with a Republican primary voting history would be inscribed on a sheet of democratic appeal," he said.
Many white evangelical women still support Mr. Cruz. Pam Brewer, who heads women's ministries at Jeffress First Baptist in Dallas, does so because she wants to end legalized abortions and strengthen border security, to prevent "criminals from coming to kill our babies" She said.
Even in her largely conservative church, Mrs. Brewer knows that some women might be attracted to Mr. O'Rourke. "We have a lot of immigrants here, we have foreigners here, we are a downtown church," she said. "He looks disarming, he is very friendly."
Potential Voters who are elected may also be difficult to turn. At an annual conference of the American Association of Christian Counselors, which met recently in Dallas, Brittney Mangum, a Christian counselor from College Station, said she knew that O'Rourke was fashionable .
"But I will not vote on emotions," she said. "I will inquire about the position of the two candidates."
But Ms. Hency thinks more evangelical women are angry at Mr. Cruz than he thinks.
"What Trump did was almost to give us permission to pick up some nuances," she said. "That's why it's a tossup now. "
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