It is often claimed that conservative religious voters, especially white evangelicals, are going the way of the dinosaur, consigned to demographic irrelevance. But they were a key component of the Republicans’ 2014 midterm victories. According to exit polls, Conservative religious voters made up as big a percentage of the electorate as ever, and they backed Republicans at least as strongly as ever.
White evangelicals were 26 percent of the electorate this year, and 78 percent of them voted Republican. That’s up from 2010, when they were 25 percent of the electorate, and 77 percent voted Republican, and 2006, when they were 24 percent of the electorate and, and 70 percent voted Republican.
The numbers for white Catholics were similarly unchanged: They made up 19 percent of the electorate this year, 60 percent of whom voted Republican, whereas in 2010 they were 17 percent of the electorate, 59 percent of whom voted Republican, and in 2006 they were 20 percent of the electorate, 49 percent of whom supported Republicans.
People who attend religious services weekly or more made up 40 percent of 2014 voters, and 58 percent of them supported Republicans, whereas in 2006, they made up 45 percent of the voters, and 55 percent backed Republicans. By contrast, people who never attend church made up 18 percent of this year’s electorate, and only 36 percent of them favored Republicans, up from 30 percent in 2006, when they were 15 percent of voters.
Republican support among all Protestants—white evangelicals, Mainliners, and ethnics—was 61 percent this year, when they were 53 percent of the electorate; 59 percent in 2010, when they were 55 percent of voters; and 54 percent in 2006, when they were again 55 percent of voters. As white Mainline Protestants continue to decline, it appears Republicans are making some gains among ethnic Protestants, whose numbers are growing.
Reiterating these exit poll results, Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition released his own poll showing that conservative Christians, Catholic and Protestant, together were a third of the electorate and over half of total Republican voters. “This is not only the largest single constituency in the electorate,” Reed said, “but it is larger than the African-American vote, the Hispanic vote, the union vote and the gay vote combined.”
The 2014 results and Reed’s boasts contrast with a much publicized Atlantic Monthly piece in October by Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute that claimed conservative evangelicals were a declining political influence. “Underlying trends indicate that at least one reason why there are a number of close elections across the South is the declining dominance of white evangelical Protestants, the most stalwart of GOP supporters,” he wrote.
In a tweet, Jones was bolder: “White evangelical Protestant numbers are declining—and bringing the GOP down with them.”
Jones hedged slightly by admitting that evangelicals remain much more motivated voters than the more liberal religiously unaffiliated. But most of the Southern races he cited were won by Republicans more decisively than most polls had indicated. And white evangelicals have remained a steady percentage of the electorate for a decade or more, even as whites overall have been a shrinking share of the population.
Like many others, Jones insisted that “a look at generational differences demonstrates that this is only the beginning of a major shift away from a robust white evangelical presence and influence in the country.” Touting a form of demographic predestination, Jones thinks liberal, less religiously observant Millennials foreshadow a more left-leaning, secular future.
In his recent survey on which he based the Atlantic story, Jones asserted white evangelicals had dropped from 22 percent to 17 percent of the U.S. population since 2007, a nearly 20 percent decline not confirmed in other polls. One critic, religion writer Tobin Grant, noted that Jones’s survey was based on self-identification as “born-again,” a phrase popular in the 1970s and 1980s but less so much today (though coined long ago by Jesus).
After Obama’s 2012 victory, Jones told the New York Times, ‘‘This election signaled the last where a white Christian strategy is workable,” with Obama winning by capturing ethnics and the religiously unaffiliated. Grant in his recent critique of Jones noted that evangelicals and other Christians are less and less divided by race in churches. And 2014 exit polls show that religious “nones” were only 12 percent of voters, a number scarcely changed since 2006.
Remarkably, the 26 percent of the 2014 electorate who were white evangelicals, according to exit polls, is higher than the 23 percent of 2004, when evangelicals were lionized as an imposing electoral force. Their key role in reelecting fellow evangelical George W. Bush provoked overwrought rhetoric by some on the left about the threat of impending theocracy. (Bush also won Hispanic evangelicals.)
Much of the public reaction to conservative Christian voting patterns, especially for evangelicals, is hyperbolic—both the warnings of impending theocracy and the claims of demographic collapse. But as religion reporter Mark Silk has noted: “Simply put, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.” The 2014 exit polls show the “religious layout of the electorate looks almost identical to the last midterm election in 2010, and not much different from the 2012 presidential election.”
Wherever demographic trends lead in the future, conservative Christians were decisive in the 2014 election, and their percentage of the electorate has not declined.
