Closing The God Gap: Why Democrats Need Religious Voters
(ANALYSIS) As media pundits over-interpret the nationwide impact of elections in New York City, New Jersey, Virginia and California, let’s contemplate this: What do the data on religious dynamics say about prospects for a rather demoralized Democratic Party in 2026-2032, and whether a more centrist strategy might help? Five events in late October provide clues.
First, in an online CNN poll with 32,340 respondents, 80% agreed that “if Democrats were willing to be less ideological, they would have the opportunity to build the country’s next governing majority.” Such online surveys are non-random and unscientific, but 80% commands attention.
The survey was conducted during a show where center-left moderation was promoted by host Michael Smerconish and guest Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic tactician and office-holder for 33 years who’s eyeing a presidential run.
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Next came an unusually lengthy (3,000 words) and blunt Sunday New York Times editorial that scrutinized U.S. House elections. The piece is highly significant considering the paper’s influence with elite Democrats, and vice versa. Its conclusions: “Democrats are in such a weak position today largely because of the unpopularity of their brand. … Many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental, and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it. … Moving to the center would enable Democrats” to confront “more aggressively and effectively” the Donald Trump Administration, deemed a serious threat to American democracy.
Meanwhile, WelcomePAC, which tries to prod Democrats toward the center, surveyed political realities in a 58-page report with input from, e.g., David Axelrod, James Carville, David Plouffe, and Lis Smith, and number-crunching by Nate Silver. It laments that since 2012, Democratic leaders have pushed unpopular positions on matters like immigration and public safety. “To win again, Democrats need to listen more to voters and less to out-of-touch donors, detached party elites, and Democratic politicians who consistently underperform.”
Then there’s a new Pew Research Center survey (with an 88% response rate and a 1.9-point error margin) taken just before the government shutdown. By 75%, Americans are “frustrated” with the Democratic Party, and 50% downright “angry.” While 57% think the party is “too extreme” to either “somewhat” or “very” degrees, a remarkable 38% of Democratic respondents say the same. Pew numbers for the Republicans were nearly as grim, as seen here.
Those four efforts ignored the religion factor, which the Democratic Party itself tends to sidestep, on which a top expert weighed in, political scientist Ryan Burge of Washington University (and at Religion Unplugged). His column last week was headlined “The Democrats Have a Religion Problem" with the subhead “Most Americans are Still Christians — Democrats Seem to Have Forgotten.”
He summarized the party’s plight: “Democrats can’t win national elections on the backs of the non-religious alone, but they’ve ceded large swaths of the Christian vote to Republicans.” That is, growing numbers of non-religious Americans vote heavily Democratic, but the party must also win millions of religious voters, who just might welcome more moderation.
In our polarized nation, Democrats rely on those non-religious Americans. This includes an anti-religious faction, plus their core of well-educated and well-off white liberals, and minorities including Black Protestants, immigrant groups, and (so far) Jews. They get little help from the declining and divided moderate to liberal “mainline” Protestants. Republicans have long enjoyed lopsided support from conservative Protestants, and a political earthquake now produces consistent majorities among white Catholics who were once devoutly Democratic.
Burge offers new tabulations on 2024 from the huge Cooperative Election Study sample. The ”God gap” between the two parties persisted, with 80% of Trump voters stating a Christian identity and only 48% of Harris voters. The non-religious provided fully 45% of Democratic voters and only 17% of Republicans. Between 2008 and 2024, white Democrats switched from 55% identifying as Christian to the current 55% who are non-religious.
Yet with Black Democrats, Christian identity rose a bit, from 61% to 64%. Asian-Americans held steady at 30% then 29%. With the all-important Hispanics, those identifying as Christians slipped from 74% to 62% over those 16 years, but that’s still a big religious population up for grabs.
Consider voters’ reported frequency of attending worship services. In 2008, 57% of white Democrats said they “seldom” or “never” attend, which by 2024 reached an overwhelming 73%. For the minority-group Democrats, the numbers were 38% and now 54%, almost identical to Americans as a whole. Also, 24% of minority Democrats worship every week, which is double the number for whites.
A Burge walkup piece before the 2024 election covered similar turf, but instead used data from the University of Chicago’s standard General Social Survey (GSS). Take something as basic as believing in God with “no doubts.” Prior to the 21st Century, the adherents of both parties expressed heavy belief. By the current decade, Republicans embrace belief by 63%, remaining close to their 20th-century numbers, but only 39% of Democrats affirm this any longer.
That’s “huge,” Burge says. It allows Republicans to offer religiously friendly words and policies that might also help Democrats with their devout minority constituents, but the party can no longer afford to alienate pivotal secularized whites.
“It’s almost as if Democrats are building a coalition that might thrive in 2050. The problem is, it’s only 2025,” he wrote.
And that assumes secularization will become culturally dominant over the coming quarter-century, but emerging hints suggest the nation’s religious slide has bottomed out. And religiously involved Americans are easier to mobilize and get to the polls than those without affiliations.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.