Friends,
I recently got a couple of messages from folks about the problem of having lost faith voters to MAGA, and they could not have been more different.
One came from a woman in Ohio. In her state, a MAGA candidate beat a longtime Democratic senator, and she believes part of the reason is that Christian radio ran attack ads against him at key hours, every day, with no response from his campaign on the air.
She wrote his team about it and only got a form letter back.
She pushed the radio station to add a disclaimer because otherwise it looks like they agreed with the attacks.
The second message took a different approach and echoed a sentiment I’ve seen across the country. It was in response to an email I sent about how Democrats have lost white evangelical voters since Jimmy Carter was elected and how we can win them back.
This person told me that it isn’t worth trying, that these voters are clearly not intelligent, and that we shouldn’t pay attention to them.
I certainly understand the impulse behind the second email. It’s hard to watch people — including people you love — vote against their best interests, especially when it’s couched in faith.
But if we write off a whole category of voters as being “too stupid” to bother with, then we’ve already lost them. People who think you think they’re too stupid don’t want anything to do with you.
And the fact is that if we’re going to take our country back from MAGA and flip Congress blue, we need those willing to change their voting habits.
The real story of the last fifty years isn’t that faith voters have gotten dumber; it’s that Democrats stopped showing up where these voters are.
And that has let MAGA Christianity fill the silence.
I appreciate both of those emails I received — and Vote Common Good is here to bridge the gap.
