2024 Presidential Election: How Will Various Faith Groups Vote?
(ANALYSIS) Well, Tuesday’s the day.
Thank God.
As Taylor Schumann tweeted recently, “The human body was not built to withstand 3 Trump election cycles.”
The weeks before an election are always some of the busiest of my life. In an average year, I do about 80-100 media interviews. In the run-up to a presidential election, I’ve done three or four in a day. Everyone is looking for another angle on how to cover the same event, and many reporters think that religion and politics is a good topic for a short story.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes bit of information: I don’t have any raw data at my disposal about how religious groups are intending to vote in the 2024 presidential election. However, I do have a way to back into some information about how things should shake out on Nov. 5.
For those who have been following along, you know that one of my favorite data source is the Cooperative Election Study. It’s fielded every year and has a huge sample.
Well, it’s done in a split design in election years with one part being fielded in early October and the rest after the election in November. Brian Schaffner and team managed to do some quick analysis of that October data collection. Their write up of a sample of 78,247 is here.
But they also provided a Shiny Application that shows us some preliminary crosstabs of about 15 different demographics. You can access that with this link. So, here’s what I did: I just replicated anything in that Shiny app that pertains to religion with the data from the prior four elections from the CES.
For those who are wondering, I am using their “likely voter model” percentages for 2024, and in 2016 and 2020, I am using validated voter data. The 2008 and 2012 datasets did not have voter validation, so I am just showing you the normal survey weights.
Let’s start with a broad look at six religious categories, and this is the vote share for the Republican in the last five election cycles.
Nothing really jumps off the screen right now, which, from a pure data perspective is a good thing. We should always assume relative stability in data from year to year, and it’s reassuring to see that there’s nothing incredibly weird in what is happening in 2024.
The Protestant share is rock steady, and so is the Catholic trend line. Jews have fluctuated a little bit over time, but that’s probably due to small sample size. It’s fair to say that about 30% of Jews have voted for the GOP the last five elections.
The bottom row are the three types of no-religious voters, and again, stability is the norm here. I would not be surprised in the slightest if the atheist/agnostic vote in 2024 is exactly the same as it was in 2020. However, if there’s anything worth flagging in this entire graph, it’s the bottom right.
The share of Americans who claim no religion in particular is huge (about 23% of the sample in recent years), and therefore any little wiggle there can have huge implications. The fact that Trump has gained 3 points with this group could be consequential.
The real issue though is that nothing in particulars are very low engagement folks. About a third of them have a high school diploma or less and make no more than $50,000/year as a household. For comparison, it’s only 12% of atheists/agnostics.
Thus, their voter turnout is low. In 2022, Pew found that just 32% of them voted, compared to 50% of atheists. So, that 3% will only matter if those folks actually show up on election day.
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.