5 things we learned about faith voters this election cycle
Former Vice President Joe Biden speaking with supporters at a phone bank at his presidential campaign office in Des Moines, Iowa. Wikipedia Commons photo.
(ANALYSIS) Election Day brought with it a series of verdicts. While the presidency remains in the balance, there were a series of trends to emerge as a result of Tuesday’s vote.
The Senate, for now, remained under Republican control, while President Trump did a lot better than the pre-election polls.
As the ballots continued to be counted in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, Biden led Trump 253 to 214 electoral votes. The candidate that reaches 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.
Trump, speaking from the White House early Wednesday, issued premature claims of victory. He also vowed to go to the Supreme Court — a move reminiscent of the Florida recount fiasco of 2000 — to continue fighting for re-election.
Biden, briefly appearing in front of supporters in Delaware, urged patience, saying the election “ain’t over until every vote is counted.”
Indeed, the presidential race has turned into a nail-biter that could take days, potentially even weeks, to decide should the courts get involved. As a result, details regarding voting trends — particularly from faith voters — were slow to trickle in given that so many mail-in ballots were used as a result of the pandemic.
As the country awaits to see whether Trump gets another four years or if Biden can unseat him, here’s what we learned about the religion vote in 2020:
Latino Evangelicals help Trump win Florida
You heard a lot about white evangelicals helping Trump in 2016 (and they did again this year, although in slightly lower numbers), but it was Hispanics — some 3.1 million voters — across Florida who helped the president win big in the Sunshine State.
It’s true that Latinos in general did help Trump (for example, Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County), the Hispanic evangelical vote mattered, as GetReligion recently pointed out. NBC News exit polling revealed that 55% of the state’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30% of Puerto Ricans and 48% of “other Latinos” backed the president.
The Latinos for Trump coalition kicked off in June 2019, with the president’s campaign launching “Evangelicals for Trump” from a megachurch in South Florida called El Rey Jesus. It’s the largest evangelical church in the country and with a majority Latino congregation. The move paid off big time for the president.
Read: Evangelicals for Trump coalition kicks off at Hispanic Megachurch
Catholic vote makes a difference (but for whom?)
The Catholic vote mattered once again in this election cycle. Biden, who is looking to be the first Catholic president since 1960, spent the past few months courting faith voters. Trump, in turn, also pursued the Catholic vote in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The Catholic vote, according to The Associated Press, seems to be evenly split — 49% going for Trump and 49% for Biden. NBC News, however, offered contradictory numbers — 37% of Catholics voting for Biden and a whopping 62% for Trump.
A EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll from last month found Catholics favoring Biden by a 12-point margin (53% to 41%) over Trump. The president did better with Catholics who regularly attend Mass.
Louisiana votes to limit abortions, while Colorado goes the other way
The national races affected local politics as well, where faith voters played an important role depending on geography. It should also be no surprise that abortion remains an issue.
Voters in Louisiana, for example, approved a constitutional amendment to prevent state courts from finding a “right to abortion” — that is public funding of abortion — in the state’s constitution. In Colorado, 59% of voters instead defeated a proposal to ban late-term abortion starting at 22 weeks.
Louisiana’s Amendment 1 passed with a 64% margin, Catholic News Agency reported, and will result in the updating of the Louisiana constitution to say that “nothing in this constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”
Washington approves requiring sex ed in schools
Despite staunch opposition from Catholic bishops, Washington state’s politically progressive voters — a majority of whom backed Biden — passed a ballot measure by nearly 60% calling for “comprehensive sex education” in public schools.
In their effort to thwart the measure, the state’s Catholic bishops cited the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes, which calls for the right of parents to “educate their children in the bosom of the family.”
At least 29 states require public schools to teach sex education, but the National Conference of State Legislatures said the issue had never before appeared on a statewide ballot, a move that ultimately backfired on conservative Christians. The measure’s passing was further proof of the declining influence of faith voters in blue states.
Muslims vote in record numbers
The electorate is constantly changing in the United States. The latest proof? An estimated one million American Muslims voted in this election, with exit polls showing that 69% of them going for Biden.
The exit polling, conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found that Muslim voters turned out in “record-breaking numbers.” Many of those voters are based in the battleground states of Michigan and Minnesota. Both of them went for Biden this year.
“CAIR would like to thank the more than one million American Muslim voters who turned out in record-breaking numbers this election cycle,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad. “The Muslim community’s significant ability to impact the results of numerous races across this country — including the presidential election — was recognized nationally by candidates and the media.”
Clemente Lisi is a senior editor and regular contributor to Religion Unplugged. He is the former deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.