Are There Any Religion Lessons From The 2024 Election?
(ANALYSIS) A really frustrating feeling is when people ask me to comment on something when I just don’t have the data to do so. I don’t like to conjecture or speculate — I just like to stick close to the data.
That doesn’t mean that the data is always right, but at least it seems a bit more foundational than just pontificating from the top of my head. As I tell my students often, we aren’t pundits. We don’t have opinions, we have data that was collected in a rigorous way and analyzed using sophisticated, empirical techniques.
Any presidential election causes a real problem for me. I do get asked to talk to reporters and do webinars and write pieces for major outlets about the role that faith played at the ballot box. There’s an issue — I just don’t have access to any reliable data for a very long time after an election.
Yes, I know there are exit polls. I pay very little attention to those. They are not academically rigorous. The really good data comes from the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study. They usually release their data from a presidential election in March or April of the following year.
So, I am living in this information black hole now. Heck, it’s even hard to collect county level election results at this point, and it’s been weeks since polls closed.
Here’s a stunning fact: The only way that The Associated Press can grab that information so quickly is because they station reporters at nearly 4,000 election offices across the country.
There’s no central repository for this stuff. It’s all done by hand. There's no official source yet. The best I’ve found is this GitHub repository where the author just scraped the data from the Fox News website.
I will post his disclaimer here: “Although the data in this repository is extensive, it is not considered the authoritative source. Researchers are encouraged to verify specific results from primary data sources when needed.”
So, let’s just get to the map, shall we?
I don’t know about you, but I find that huge blob of red that runs nearly vertical across the center of the country jumps out to me. It extends from central Texas all the way up through the Dakotas.
I think it’s possible, but not easy, to drive from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and never leave a county that wasn’t at least 80% for Donald Trump in November. Pretty amazing.
But that red blob also stretches eastward, too. There’s a huge pocket in Missouri, then it picks up again in Kentucky and extends downward into the northern part of Alabama and Mississippi.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
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.