‘They Just Walked Away': New Poll Shows How Badly Democrats Are Losing Christian Voters of All Stripes
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For years, Doug Pagitt has been sounding the alarm to fellow Democrats about a perceived hostility toward voters of faith within the party, flagging a fetishing of secularism that is reshaping the electoral map to their detriment. Now, he's sending around the receipts to prove his point.
Pagitt is a progressive pastor and the executive director of Vote Common Good, which focuses on mobilizing voters of faith. Recently, he commissioned one of the largest polls of Christian voters ever to quantify the mood of the nation's largest voting bloc. (Change Research, which counts major labor unions as clients and veterans of both Bill and Hillary Clinton as top hands, crunched the numbers last month. It runs with a standard margin of error of under 3 percentage points.) The results from more than 1,700 self-identified Christians—including Catholics and Mormons—offer plenty of reasons for Democrats still digging out from last year's electoral thumping to question some of their foundational assumptions about the voters they are struggling to win over.
A shocking 75% of these Christian voters say that they have little or no trust in the Democratic Party, according to the data shared first with TIME. (By contrast, Republicans just about break even on that question.) A stunning 70% of these voters have little to no confidence in the federal government. And 61% of these voters think life in America is harder today for people of faith than it was 10 years ago.
Taken as a whole, this dataset on 60 specific questions should set off flares for Democrats, who lost this group by a two-to-one margin in last year's presidential contest.
'You can't be the majority party if you ignore the majority faith in this country,' Pagitt tells me. 'We know there's this tension in the party.'
Democrats have long struggled to make a space for faith within the party, or overcome a sense—especially in the consultant class and very-online activist set—that any embrace of religion is a threat to the party's brand of inclusivity. For millions of voters who hold their faith as a core piece of identity, this has created a political stumbling block.
'Republicans have made a concerted effort,' Pagitt says. 'Democrats have done everything they can never to name that identity. They have a built-in bias against these identities in the Democratic Party.'
The polls are definitely trending away from Democrats on this question. In 2016, a full 75% of voters fell into the broad definition of Christian voters, according to exit polls. Trump carried the 27% of voters who identified as Protestants by a 59-36 margin and won the 23% of Catholic voters by a 50-46 split, while winning the 24% who called themselves 'Other Christian' by a 54-43 margin. In 2020, these voters accounted for 68% of the electorate, with Joe Biden—the nation's second-ever Catholic President—winning Catholics by a 52-47 split. Among other Christians, though, Donald Trump dominated with a 60-39 division, according to exit polls.
And last year, with Christians accounting for 64% of the electorate Trump dominated Kamala Harris: he carried the 21% of the electorate that identifies as Catholics by a 59-39 margin, and the 43% of the electorate that identifies as generically Christian by a 63-36 margin, according to exit polls.
To put all that in context, recall that Black voters are the most reliable members of the Democratic coalition and the Black Church is the only reason these numbers aren't even worse.
While it is clear that the share of the electorate formally aligning with organized faith is shrinking, Pagitt smartly notes that membership with a local house of worship is not a prerequisite to being counted as a voter of faith. For a lot of Americans who have perhaps cut ties with local churches, that piece of their identity remains surprisingly durable. It's why the imprint of faith traditions last longer than any church directory.
Grievance is certainly part of this puzzle. Pagitt's survey finds a full 50% of Christians say religion is losing influence in American life. And 60% of these Christian voters say they reliably back Republicans; 62% say they would never consider voting for a Democrat.
Both the Democratic Party and its voters are seen as unfriendly toward Christianity. In Pagitt's survey, 58% of Christians see the Democratic Party as hostile to Christianity and 54% see the same traits among Democratic voters. By contrast, the same voters say the Republican Party is friendly to the tune of 70% and say the same about GOP voters at the rate of 72%.
Pagitt is clear-eyed about what is possible given how much partisanship is baked into all this and how tough it is for brands to reboot. He's been working with candidates since Vote Common Good launched in 2018 to help progressive efforts connect with faith traditions and constantly has to face reluctance to tell their personal stories.
But in training sessions regardless of locality, Pagitt boils down his message on faith outreach to six very simple words: 'I like you' and 'we need you.' Once that respect is signaled to voters of faith, Pagitt says, a conversation on substance is a whole lot easier. Still, it's not like Democrats are going to turn around trends in this super-majority voting bloc easily.
'They squandered it,' Pagitt says of the Democrats. 'They just walked away.'
In turn, so too did Christian votes walk away from Democrats.
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