Delegates stand for the opening prayer on last day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on August 22, 2024.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds—AFP via Getty Images
For years, Doug Pagitt has been sounding the alarm to fellow Democrats about a perceived hostility toward voters of faith within the party, flagging a fetishing of secularism that is reshaping the electoral map to their detriment. Now, he’s sending around the receipts to prove his point.
Pagitt is a progressive pastor and the executive director of Vote Common Good, which focuses on mobilizing voters of faith. Recently, he commissioned one of the largest polls of Christian voters ever to quantify the mood of the nation’s largest voting bloc. (Change Research, which counts major labor unions as clients and veterans of both Bill and Hillary Clinton as top hands, crunched the numbers last month. It runs with a standard margin of error of under 3 percentage points.) The results from more than 1,700 self-identified Christians—including Catholics and Mormons—offer plenty of reasons for Democrats still digging out from last year’s electoral thumping to question some of their foundational assumptions about the voters they are struggling to win over.