In a concentrated effort to take back the Presidency for the first time in two cycles, Republican party leaders are zoning in on a key group of voters: Evangelicals.



According to statistics, as many 40-50 million Evangelicals failed to vote in 2012, an election in which President Obama beat Mitt Romney by some 5 million votes.



That's why, in looking ahead to the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party has undertaken "a massive plan to engage millions of churchgoing Christian voters who did not vote in 2012", according to a report from the Washington Examiner.



"[Evangelicals are] the largest, most underappreciated, under-tapped voting bloc in all of American political history," said Chad Connelly, the Republican National Committee's director of faith engagement -- a position created in 2013 in an effort to avoid repeating the 2012 elections' losses.



Instead of going directly to churches, Connelly encourages pastors and church leaders to register their congregations to vote. In less than two years, he has spoken to 52,000 pastors, priests, and faith leaders, and traveled to 38 states, and expects his team to grow. Thus far he has concentrated on 11 potential states that Republicans hope to gain in 2016: Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.

