The Politics Of Organized Nones And Voting In 2024
(ANALYSIS) I learned a term in graduate school that I probably use too much now in my everyday life: self-selection effect.
It’s something that the average person does all the time and doesn’t realize: They choose to be part of something. It could be a sports team, a political party or a religious organization. They aren’t randomly chosen to participate; they make an intentional effort to join a social group.
Of course, in the world of religion, almost everything is self-selection when you become an adult. Whether to attend church, what church to attend and how often to attend are voluntary choices.
Other significant demographic factors like age and race are immutable facts of a respondent. Whether to identify as Protestant, Hindu or atheist is completely up to the person answering the survey question.
Freedom From Religion Foundation chapters erected “Be a Voter” billboards in swing states. (Photo via FFRF on Facebook)
That’s why I like studying an organization like the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It’s a self-selected collection of individuals who become members and pay dues because they feel it’s a good use of their time and resources. But how much do members of a group like FFRF represent the larger nonreligious group they come from?
Paul Djupe and I are lucky enough to be able to answer that question because we partnered with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to do two surveys. One was a random sample of nonreligious Americans administered by Qualtrics. The other was a survey of FFRF membership. This post will focus specifically on the political views of FFRF and how they compares to different types of nonreligious Americans as well as other groups like Catholics and Latter-day Saints.
First, let’s just get the most basic question: How do folks plan to vote in November? We fielded this survey before Joe Biden decided not to seek reelection in July. So, just keep that in mind.
Here’s the headline statistic: 94% of Freedom From Religion Foundation members said they planned to vote for the Democrat on election day.
In the total sample of 11,422 members of FFRF, just 56 said they planned to vote for Donald Trump. That’s 0.5%. Among the rest of the FFRF sample, just 1.6% said they would vote for a candidate not listed, 1.3% wanted to vote for Jill Stein, and 0.8% liked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
There’s undoubtedly a leftward tilt among the random sample of nonreligious Americans, but it’s not that strong.
Among all nones, about 60% said that they wanted to vote for Biden in November of 2024, while 16% intended to support Donald Trump. That other big story is that 9% of nonreligious folks said they would vote for RFK Jr. Of course, that will not happen now as he has dropped out of the race. However, according to this poll, he received reasonably strong support for a third party candidate.
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.