How 40 Protestant Denominations Voted In The Last 4 Presidential Elections
(ANALYSIS) I don’t know if you have heard or not, but there’s an election coming up. And it may be “the most important election in the history of the cosmos.”
Or it may just be like every other presidential election we’ve had in the last 50 years.
Yes, it most certainly matters who wins the highest office in the land, but in all honesty the person the sitting in the White House has less impact on your day-to-day life than the handful of people who serve on your local city council. And I bet you’ve never even heard of most of those folks.
But this gives me the opportunity to do something that I have always wanted to do, but just never had a great reason: I am going to show you how the forty largest Protestant “denominations” have voted in the last four presidential elections: Obama vs. McCain, Obama vs. Romney, Clinton vs. Trump and Biden vs. Trump.
I took the forty largest denominations in the largest publicly available survey that has this level of religious granularity. It’s the Cooperative Election Study. The total sample sizes in the last four presidential election years are: 32.8K, 54.5K, 64.6K, and 61K.
If your specific denomination doesn’t show up here there’s a very simple reason for that - it’s incredibly small. I kept any denomination that had at least 380 respondents in all four survey years combined.
Let me start by showing you the two party vote for Donald Trump in 2020 from all forty denominations that I included:
My first impression is simply: There is a lot of variation in the voting preferences of Protestant Christianity. The denominations that are most heavily Republican come largely from a handful of families: Pentecostal, non-denominational, and Baptist. I can already anticipate the first comment on this: “Those are all basically the same thing.”
Yes, we know. But there are a few that snuck up on me in ‘reddest’ denominations. For instance, 73% of Evangelical Presbyterians voted for Trump and 68% of Free Methodists. That one really stuck out to me because I hung out with a lot of FM folks while earning my undergraduate degree and they most certainly weren’t Republicans.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.