2024 Election Post-Mortem: Black Americans, Religion and the Vote
(ANALYSIS) So far, I’ve taken a really good look at how three Christian groups voted in the 2024 election: evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics.
But there’s another group that I haven’t examined yet: Black Protestants. Whenever I post a graph that contains a category for Black Protestants, I always get a comment or two asking why they are their own group. Let me briefly answer that before diving into the data.
The Black church in America is an entirely different culture than the average White evangelical or mainline tradition. Anyone who has attended a worship service in a Black church tradition knows that to be true.
But beyond a difference in worship styles, there are many ways that the Black church should be considered its own category. African Americans were denied access to all kinds of institutions in the United States throughout most of American history, so the church became more than just a spiritual retreat.
It was also the center of social and political life. That’s why you see politicians often give speeches during a worship service at a Black church — because those running for elected office had no other venue to speak to a large group of people.
For those interested in reading more, I recommend “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Also, theologically and politically speaking, the Black church does not fit into the evangelical or mainline Protestant category. In some ways, Black Protestants look a whole lot like evangelicals. They take a literal view of the Bible and have views of sexuality and gender that are decidedly conservative. (I explore this in depth in my new book from Oxford University Press).
So, let’s just throw them in with the evangelicals, right? Well, when it comes to the ballot box, the two groups could not be more different. Remember, 83% of White evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
How did Black Americans vote in 2024? They certainly aren’t big fans of the Republican Party.
Among Black Protestants, the Democrats receive nearly all their votes. That’s historically been the case, and that’s also true when looking at the last five presidential elections.
When Barack Obama ran in both 2008 and 2012, nearly 95% of Black Protestants supported his candidacy. That number has dropped just slightly in the last couple of election cycles. About 8% of Black Protestants supported Trump in 2016, and that figure crept up to 12% in both 2020 and 2024.
Among Black Catholics, there’s also been a bit of a rightward shift, too. At least 90% of them supported the Democrats in 2008, 2012 and 2016. But only 84% of Black Catholics favored Biden in 2020, and then that went down to 79% when Kamala Harris was at the top of the ticket. And that same pattern repeats among nonreligious African Americans: Near unanimous support for Obama, then a bit of rightward drift over the last three election cycles.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, 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.