Religious Alignments in the 2024 US Presidential Election

Religion has always been an important influence on partisan alignments in the United States, but the nature of that influence has changed dramatically over the course of American history. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American political parties were characterized by coalitions of distinct ethnocultural groups (see, e.g. Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1979), with the Whigs and Republicans drawing disproportionately from WASP "pietistic" Northern European ethnic groups, and the Democrats serving as the party of religious minorities, especially Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Ireland. (And the Democrats drew as well on Southern evangelical Protestants--a legacy of the Civil War.) These religious divisions persisted even into the years of the New Deal, with its supposed "class based" party politics (see Berelson, Lazarfeld and McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign, 1954). Even in recent years, scholars and journals implicitly work on the basis of this model, speculating about the "Catholic vote," "the Jewish vote," or, the "Muslim vote."

Despite the virtues of the ethnocultural model for historical analysis and some continuing explanatory power, social scientists have offered an alternative analysis of religious voting patterns, focused not on ethnoreligious affiliation, but rather on theological divisions. The now classic works of Robert Wuthnow (The Restructuring of American Religion, 1988) and James Davison Hunter (Culture Wars, 1991) have shifted scholarly attention increasingly to competing the conservative and liberal religious worldviews which have created internal divisions within almost all major American religious traditions and fostered new alliances across those traditions. These competing coalitions have shaped American party coalitions, as conservatives have gravitated to the Republican party and liberals to the Democrats.

Presidential elections of the late 20th and early 21st centuries exhibited a kind of hybrid pattern of religious voting. Among members of the major white Protestant and Catholic churches, theological perspective played the dominant role in determining partisan choices, while most ethnoreligious minorities--Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, Muslims, Hindus and others--remained in the historic political home of ethnoreligious minorities, the Democratic Party. 

As electoral competition moved into the 21st century another group enter the American political arena: secular voters, often referred to in popular scholarly parlance as the "Nones," a rapidly growing contingent. Although these voters as a group became a major Democratic constituency, there were clear differences of degree in that adherence, with agnostics and atheists much more solidly Democratic than the simply unaffiliated. And as Layman, Campbell and Green (Secular Surge, 2021) showed, some nonreligious voters have developed a strong "secular" identity, which intensifies their Democratic propensities but complicates the Party's effort to retain and attract religious voters.

The 2024 presidential election presents a fascinating case of the interaction of all these influences. Some ethnocultural dividing lines could still be detected: Jewish and Black Protestant voters were still overwhelmingly Democratic, as to a lesser extent were Latino Catholics. But the "restructuring" or "culture war" forces showed signs of intruding into minority religious communities in new ways, suggesting the strengthening of such partisan religious divisions.

This paper examines religious voting patterns in the 2024 presidential election using two standard political science surveys: the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES) and the Cooperative Election Study (CES). Each survey has strengths and weaknesses for our purposes. The ANES is the "gold standard" for election surveys and has a fairly large national sample, with detailed religious measures, including affiliation, religious identities, theological items or proxies for them, and measures of religious commitment. Thus, it is especially useful for delineating and examining restructuring influences in electoral choice. The CES, on the other hand, has solid measures of religious affiliation and commitment, but virtually nothing tapping theological divisions (except an item on "born again" status). The survey is very large, however, with around 60,000 respondents, allowing analysis of the voting patterns of even small ethnoreligious or sectarian groups. Thus, in combination these surveys provide the necessary data for a full analysis of religious influences on 2024 presidential voting, as well as for a historical examination of the relative influence of ethnocultural and restructuring factors in presidential elections since 1936. 

Of course, many factors other than religion shape presidential voting. As a final contribution of this paper, we will examine how religion stands up as an explanatory factor when controlling for other important influences, such as income, education, gender and age. All these are often cited by social scientists as "formative" for electoral choice, and it is vital to take them into account in any effort to assess the role of religion in American electoral politics.