SUBSCRIBE NOW

SIGHT

Be informed. Be challenged. Be inspired.

US POLITICS: SHOULD TRUMP WORRY ABOUT WHITE CATHOLIC AND MAINLINE PROTESTANT VOTES?

Trump 2020 1

JACK JENKINS, of Religion News Service, looks at what pollsters and political experts are saying about white Christian voters in the 2020 US election…

RNS

As the 2020 election season heats up, both parties are likely to begin vying for the votes of a crucial group of white, Christian voters.

And no, it’s not white evangelicals.

While white evangelicals have garnered more attention than other faith groups over the past few decades, pollsters and political activists believe white Catholics and mainline Protestants could have an outsized impact in November 2020.

Trump 2020 1

Voters cast their ballots at a polling place inside St Leo’s Catholic Church in Baltimore on Election Day on 6th November, 2012. PICTURE: Patrick Semansky/AP Photo.

The reason has to do with their location and persuadability. Unlike white evangelicals, whose support for Republican candidates and US President Donald Trump has become increasingly ironclad, white mainliners and Catholics tend to change their minds about candidates from election to election. Many also live in Rust Belt swing states that Trump won only by narrow margins in 2016.

Trump won about 52 per cent of the overall Catholic vote in 2016, according to exit polls aggregated by Pew Research, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 45 per cent. Winning among Catholics, who make up the country’s largest religious group, was a major achievement, as it reversed a leftward trend that saw President Obama win their votes in 2008 and 2012.

“The nature of the Catholic sensibility – based in both faith and reason – is such that does not lend itself to being ideological and rather lends itself to being persuadable.”

– Steven Krueger, president of the group Catholic Democrats.

Trump’s advantage was driven by a surge of support among white Catholics, 60 per cent of whom backed him, the highest margin of any candidate in at least two decades. By contrast, he only won 26 per cent of Hispanic Catholics, a growing subset of the faith that leans heavily Democratic.

Steven Krueger, president of the group Catholic Democrats, attributes the swing in white Catholic loyalties to Catholics’ unwillingness to be owned completely by either party. 

“The nature of the Catholic sensibility – based in both faith and reason – is such that does not lend itself to being ideological and rather lends itself to being persuadable,” Krueger said in an email.

That quality, he said, should give Democrats hope that they can win back white Catholics in the future.

Trump 2020 2

Chart by Jack Jenkins for RNS, using PRRI data

Persuading white Catholics is especially important in Rust Belt states that helped hand the president his 2016 Electoral College victory – namely, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. According to the 2010 Religious Congregations and Membership Study, all three states are home to counties with some of the highest densities of Catholic congregations in the country, with some boasting 21 or more.

Several of those counties flipped to Trump in 2016 after backing Democrats in the past.

Recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2018 American Values Survey shows Trump enjoying majority favorability (52 per cent) among white Catholics who lack a college degree, an important figure in all three states, where analysts say sizable chunks of the electorate do not attend college.

Assessing the white mainline Protestant vote is a bit trickier. Elesha Coffman, assistant professor of history at Baylor University, explained that the category includes millions of Christians from denominations such as the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church (USA), which harbour significant ideological divisions. Coffman pointed to the UMC’s recent debate over same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination as one such example.

Such a large and variegated group can be difficult to poll with precision, and most major exit polls do not break out mainline Protestants as a defined bloc.

She did point to some general consistencies, however.

The mainline’s middle- and upper-class Americans tend not to be advocating change, said Coffman, author of The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline. “The status quo is working pretty well for people who are white, middle class and educated,” she noted.

Indeed, PRRI’s polling at the time of Trump’s 2017 inauguration showed that 57 per cent of mainline Protestants approved of the president.

Yet as Trump enters the second half of his term, his numbers with both groups seem less stable. A 2018 PRRI poll found that white Catholics who viewed Trump unfavorably had risen to 52 per cent, up slightly from 48 per cent in 2017. White mainline Protestants are exhibiting even more dramatic shifts: As of September, 2018, 48 per cent of them approved of Trump’s performance, a drop of nine percentage points from January, 2017.

Trump 2020 3

Chart by Jack Jenkins for RNS, using PRRI data.

The back-and-forth among white mainline voters in particular has led some observers to suggest the group may be among partisan America’s last true “swing voters”. The reason, Coffman suggested, may be that Trump simultaneously appeases and offends the demographic, letting its members keep more of their money by lowering taxes while at the same time “violating their church’s sense of social justice, and threatening their institutions,” she said.

The fluctuations in support could also reflect the sustained criticism of the president from both faith groups’ leaders.

Several Catholic bishops, for instance, have condemned the administration’s stance on immigration, and Pope Francis himself has feuded with Trump regarding his proposed border wall.

Last year, members of the United Methodist Church attempted to invoke church discipline against then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for carrying out family separations along the US-Mexico border.

Meanwhile, the National Council of Churches, representing a number of mainline denominations, has repeatedly voiced criticism of the president and his policies.

Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University, suggested in an email that immigration was an issue that could cause Trump trouble among Catholics and mainliners at the ballot box.

“I think the immigration issue may be a problem for religious voters,” he said. “For many voters of faith, religion isn’t just about the ‘thou shalt nots’ but is also about the ‘thou shalls.’ And one of the things that you are supposed to do is to ‘love your neighbour.’”

Still, Democrats might not celebrate just yet. Sracic pointed out that Trump has defied expectations before.

“It’s also important, with Trump, to not conflate approval numbers with voting,” Sracic said. “The election of 2020 is going to be a choice between two candidates.”

Trump 2020 4

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives for service at First Presbyterian Church in Muscatine, Iowa, on 24th January, 2016. PICTURE: Andrew Harnik/AP Photo.

For her part, Coffman cautioned against drawing a straight line between views held by mainline leadership and those of the laity. She noted ideological divides between the pulpit and the pews have been common throughout American history.

“It’s not safe to assume that what the church leadership cares about is the same as what the laity cares about,” she said. “But what the laity actually cares about is a much harder question to get at.”

Regardless, even a lack of clarity about the two groups’ political leanings is good news for Trump’s Democratic opponents, especially those who can speak to the religious values of voters.

“It’s not safe to assume that what the church leadership cares about is the same as what the laity cares about. But what the laity actually cares about is a much harder question to get at.”

– Elesha Coffman, assistant professor of history at Baylor University.

Democratic presidential hopefuls New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, former Maryland Congressman John Delaney and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, all Catholics, have been happy to discuss their faith in public. At least three other hopefuls – Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg – hail from mainline Christianity. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Senator Kamala Harris of California have also exhibited a willingness to discuss religious matters.

When combined with efforts to bolster support among religious populations that already lean toward Democrats – black Protestants, Jews, Hispanic Catholics and others – the faith angle could pay dividends for Democrats.

But Sracic warned that among working-class religious voters in the Rust Belt, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan “had [a] religious dimension” all its own. His assessment echoes scholars who have noted the influence of Christian nationalism in the 2016 election.

Trump’s full-throated opposition to abortion, backed up by his nominees to the Supreme Court, is also a central draw for Catholics and even many mainliners.

“Abortion, particularly late-term abortion, has become the latest issue potentially instilling in religious voters the sense that Democrats are the enemy, and driving them to support any available alternative,” Sracic said.

Trump 2020 5

Former San Antonio Mayor and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro speaks during an event where he announced his decision to seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, on 12th January, 2019, in San Antonio. PICTURE: Eric Gay/AP Photo

And for all their ease with God talk on the stump, Democratic candidates are still likely to be cast by conservatives as anti-religion in various ways. Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W Bush, recently argued that Harris exhibited “anti-Catholic bigotry” when she asked a judicial nominee about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organisation.

It’s also important to remember that other issues may outweigh religion for many Rust Belt white voters in 2020.

Sracic noted that the closure of General Motors automobile plants in Ohio and elsewhere, along with other economic and social concerns, may be “a real problem for Trump” among white Catholics voters in the region.

Religion, in other words, is only one of many factors influencing voters ahead of the 2020 election – or any election. As Coffman explained, “In 2016, it seemed most Americans were voting their demographic more than their denominational affiliation.”

 

Donate



sight plus logo

Sight+ is a new benefits program we’ve launched to reward people who have supported us with annual donations of $26 or more. To find out more about Sight+ and how you can support the work of Sight, head to our Sight+ page.

Musings

TAKE PART IN THE SIGHT READER SURVEY!

We’re interested to find out more about you, our readers, as we improve and expand our coverage and so we’re asking all of our readers to take this survey (it’ll only take a couple of minutes).

To take part in the survey, simply follow this link…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

For security, use of Google's reCAPTCHA service is required which is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.