"In the 1976 election, the Republican candidate, President Gerald Ford, was the relatively pro-choice candidate; the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, was an evangelical Protestant who believed that abortion was immoral. The countermobilizations that Roe helped energize changed all of this. The Christian evangelical movement, which had largely stayed out of politics in the decades before the 1960s, saw abortion as a threat to biblical values and began to organize against Roe. Members of the Republican Party’s New Right, such as Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the ERA, saw an obvious connection between their goals and those of Christian evangelicals. By the end of the 1970s, the two groups had formed an alliance that would dominate the Republican Party and revolutionize American politics. Ronald Reagan welcomed evangelical and fundamentalist Christian voters into the Republican Party and actively courted pro-life leaders. In the 1980 election, many evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians moved squarely into the republican camp and became an important part of the party’s base of support."