(Bloomberg View) — Gov. Mike Pence and the Indiana Legislature have likely done the Republican Party and its presidential candidates a favor.
No matter what you think of Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which critics said would allow business to discriminate against gays and lesbians, the national backlash against it from business and other institutions shows how costly such actions can be, as View’s Barry Ritholtz documents.
Since all the 2016 Republican candidates lined up in support of the legislation, which was signed by a Gov. who himself is still a sort-of maybe contender for the nomination, why is it good for them?
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They got an early reminder: The positions that play well in a small bubble of party politics and on Fox News may go wrong when the larger November 2016 electorate is exposed to them.
The only way a politician can get a party’s nomination is to be fluent in the language the party speaks. For Republicans today, this means Christians in the U.S. are an at-risk minority, and Obamacare is to blame for rising health costs and lost coverage, and the economy is a disaster, and Benghazi is a scandal that has been covered up. And so on.
Those statements are false.