What the election tells us about religion in America
Opinion by Jennifer Rubin
The fallibility of polling should make us more cautious than usual about exit poll results, but if viewed in context, they provide some interesting nuggets about the intersection of voters’ religious affiliations (or lack thereof) and political preferences.
White evangelical Christians remain firmly in the Republican camp. Whether male or female, or from the North or the South, they remain in a party increasingly defined by cultural, racial and emotional factors. To them, it does not matter whether President Trump was incompetent at addressing covid-19 or was personally corrupt; he was their warrior against “others” (elites, urbanites, minorities, immigrants). Politics is not about problem-solving but rather about “owning the libs." Robert P. Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” told me this group continues to punch far above its weight at the polls.
“While White evangelical Protestants have declined as a proportion of the population over the last decade, from 21 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2019, they have maintained an outsize presence at the ballot box, somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of voters,” Jones said. He described this as a “time machine,” whereby the White evangelical Christians’ outsize vote “has the effect of turning back the demographic clock by nearly a decade. In other words, we’re living in the demographic realities of 2020, but our elections are being conducted, demographically speaking, in 2012 America.”
After accounting for differences between the two post-election voting analysis and taking out non-Protestants (who may still identify as evangelical), White protestant evangelicals still make up 20 to 25 percent of the voting population and went heavily for President Trump. Trump received upwards of 81 percent of the population according to the National Election Pool and AP/VoteCast exit polls, roughly the same as in 2016. “Among key battleground states in the Sun Belt, Trump’s support was even higher: 82% in Florida, 89% in Georgia, 86% in North Carolina, and 82% in Texas,” Jones said. “In these increasingly competitive states, White evangelicals were the decisive force anchoring those states against the strong tides of demographic and cultural change.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/12/what-election-tells-us-about-religion-america/
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