Inside Florida’s evangelical vote split along racial identity

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(ANALYSIS) Three days after President Donald Trump came to Pensacola, Florida to rally his conservative base, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and charismatic televangelist Paula White were back in the Florida panhandle city speaking at a political revival meeting that was sponsored by “Evangelicals for Trump.”

Tropical Storm Zeta was gaining strength by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and poised to become a Category 1 Hurricane, but there was still a crowd inside the Palafox Wharf banquet hall in downtown Pensacola, where Lara was welcomed by some of the president’s most passionate supporters.

“It really did look like it was getting tight towards the end of 2016, so I remember my husband, my brother-in-law and I all on radio calls at the end encouraging people to get out and vote here in the Panhandle,” Lara told the gathering in the Oct. 27 speech covered by Pensacola’s  WEAR-TV. 

The Florida panhandle has been vital to Trump’s re-election strategy to win the Sunshine State in a presidential race that centers on him and his top aides rallying evangelicals in battleground states across the country while Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has tried to appeal to Black Christians on social media and the online pulpits of some of the largest African American churches in the country that mobilize voters to the polls by the millions.

The latest polling shows that about 80% of White evangelicals support Trump, about the same that supported him in 2016 and a key part of his base. Trump’s support from White Catholics and White Protestants who aren’t evangelical has slipped. And while Latino evangelicals narrowly favor Trump, 67% of hispanic Catholics and 90% of Black Protestants support Biden, according to recent Pew data. 

Rev. Derrick Harkins, Director of Faith Outreach for the Democratic National Committee, said a key campaign goal has been mobilizing voters to get to the polls early.

“Part of our success has been to get people to vote early and that has been a huge success,” Harkin said. “Every week the Biden campaign has been doing messages directly to congregations and the churches have been hearing. Everybody understands what we need to do and we are not taking any element for granted.”

Of course, Biden is aided by the fact that there are many mega churches in African American communities across the country who have been mobilizing voters. One example of this is in Atlanta where Rev. Rafael Warnock, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. led, is in a close race for the United States Senate and polls have him neck and neck with the Republican.

But Florida will be one of the big prizes because the political battle ground all depends on where one is. This was made clear in the last four years in a state that is home to Walt Disney World as well as President Trump and warm green waters that attract fishermen and hurricanes.

Four years ago, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton worked hard to mobilize voters in Miami, West Palm Beach, Tampa and other Democratic strongholds in the Sunshine State. But where the Apalachicola River marks the line of Eastern and Central Standard Time zones in Florida, it also marks where the state’s politics change from purple to red. 

“This is not just another election. It’s a crossroads. This is about my grandchildren, their grandchildren and the future of our country,” preached White, during her Pensacola speech.

The Florida Panhandle has been solidly conservative for decades. In 2001 the Panhandle helped George W. Bush narrowly defeat former Vice President Al Gore in an election that was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. 

Fighting for election integrity

The state of Florida, like much of the country, is a divided political battleground where party affiliation and voting is as sacred as the family Bible. Trump has worked hard to fill the 11th Judicial Circuit where he has appointed conservative justices in courtrooms in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

As a Black man who grew up in Pensacola, I can say with experience that race relations there are complicated. Blacks and Whites work together, play football together and share the best fishing outlets and boating lanes, but usually political views are just understood and not spoken.

The Panhandle is home to white beaches and Air Force and Navy Bases, with many military towns. They lean Republican. 

Rev. Frank Jenkins, 76, who is Black, retired from the Navy after 22 years. He has also been preaching for decades.

“For years a lot of African Americans were not voting, but this year we had Souls to the Polls and through early voting many more Blacks and Latinos are voting this year,” Jenkins said. “The early voters came out energized to vote.” 

But in recent months a number of prominent African Americans pastors have died with COVID-19 infections, like Rev. Michael Johnson, pastor of the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church of Pensacola, who was a popular church leader in the social justice movement.

As a child I remember meeting Martin Luther King Sr. “Daddy King,” who came to speak after his son was assassinated. In the 1960’s, I looked up to the African American ministers like my old pastor, Rev. KC Bass or my hero in later years, attorney Fred Gray, Rosa Parks’s lawyer and a Church of Christ elder from Tuskegee, Ala.

The gains, like the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that preachers and Civil Rights icons like the late Rev. CT Vivian or Rep. John Lewis fought for at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma are being threatened by President Trump and Republicans in the Senate who do not want the swing states North Carolina and Pennsylvania to be able to count ballots turned in after Nov. 3, even as a recent Supreme Court ruling allows such. 

Recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett refused to get involved when the Court reviewed the election cases, saying in a statement that she recused herself “because of the need for a prompt resolution of it and because she has not had time to fully review the parties’ filings.”

Now, both Republicans and Democrats wonder if the road to the White House will wind through the Supreme Court as lawyers on both sides of the divide are poised to file legal rebuttals as the election results continue coming in after Election Day.

Hope for unity

The 2020 campaign in Florida is so heated it’s become the political equivalent to the Florida University v. Florida State University football game, had it been held this year. Even former FSU head coach Bobby Bowden drew heat from his former players after he endorsed Trump for the re-election.

During his years as a coach, Bowden would take his entire football team to a White church and then Black church before the start of the season. He earned the love of hundreds of his players and yet according to several players, who talked to me privately about Bowden’s comments in support of President Trump, “It really hurts.”

Dr. Everett W. Huffard is  the retired Associate Dean of the Harding University School of Theology in Memphis, Tennessee. Today, he works to bring churches together that are concerned about the state of race relations today. 

“I can't remember an election being this divisive,” said Huffard, who is White. He teamed up with an African American minister at a Memphis Church of Christ to preach on the state of race relations in the wake of the Black Lives Movement this year.

“The concern that I have from a personal perspective has revealed how weak our discipleship has been,” said Huffard, who continues to find ways to bridge the racial divide, “because I think we should be Christians first and Americans second.”

Every morning John Carr, 69, a retired CPA, watches the sunrise from his home in Amelia Island, Florida.  Even though he is a registered Republican, in the last two presidential elections he has voted for a third party candidate.

”Regardless of how tumultuous this election has been, there is still hope on the horizon and that is in our faith in the Lord,” Carr said. “The sunrise says something about a fresh start and regardless of the outcome of the election or a bad day, the sunrise reminds me that everyday I get a fresh start.”