2024 Election Post-Mortem: Black Americans, Religion and the Vote

Is there evidence of a racial realignment in the data?

So far, I’ve taken a really good look at how three Christian groups voted in the 2024 election - evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics. But there’s another group that I haven’t examined yet - Black Protestants. Whenever I post a graph that contains a category for Black Protestants I always get a comment or two asking why they are their own group. Let me briefly answer that before diving into the data.

The Black Church in America is an entirely different culture than the average white evangelical or mainline tradition. Anyone who has attended a worship service in a Black Church tradition knows that to be true. But beyond a difference in worship styles, there are many ways that the Black Church should be considered its own category. African-Americans were denied access to all kinds of institutions in the United States throughout most of American history - so the church became more than just a spiritual retreat. It was also the center of social and political life. That’s why you see politicians often give speeches during a worship service at a Black Church - because those running for elected office had no other venue to speak to a large group of people. For those interested in reading more, I recommend The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Also, theologically and politically speaking - the Black Church does not fit into the evangelical or mainline Protestant category. In some ways, Black Protestants look a whole lot like evangelicals. They take a literal view of the Bible and have views of sexuality and gender that are decidedly conservative. (I explore this in depth in my new book from Oxford University Press). So, let’s just throw them in with the evangelicals, right? Well, when it comes to the ballot box, the two groups could not be more different. Remember - 83% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.

How did Black Americans vote in 2024? They certainly aren’t big fans of the Republican party.

Among Black Protestants, the Democrats receive nearly all their votes. That’s historically been the case and that’s also true when looking at the last five presidential elections. When Barack Obama ran in both 2008 and 2012, nearly 95% of Black Protestants supported his candidacy. That number has dropped just slightly in the last couple of election cycles. About 8% of Black Protestants supported Trump in 2016 and that figure crept up to 12% in both 2020 and 2024.

Among Black Catholics, there’s also been a bit of a rightward shift, too. At least 90% of them supported the Democrats in 2008, 2012, and 2016. But only 84% of Black Catholics favored Biden in 2020 and then that went down to 79% when Kamala Harris was at the top of the ticket. And that same pattern repeats among non-religious African Americans. Near unanimous support for Obama then a bit of rightward drift over the last three election cycles.

A couple things I want to point out here - religion matters very little among Black voters. Compare the electoral choices of Black Protestants and Black Nones - it’s statistically the same. The other thing that jumps out is that the GOP is making some gains here, but they are relatively modest. Trump may have gained 4-5 points between 2016 and 2024. It’s more than nothing, but not by much.

It may be helpful at this point to show you the religious composition of Black Americans. In 2012, 63% were Protestants and 27% were non-religious with the remaining 10% being all other traditions. In the last twelve years, the Protestant share has dropped by about ten points and almost all of that flowed into the non-religious. Today, a bare majority of Black people are Protestants and 36% are non-religious.

That’s why the Catholic vote shares above doesn’t really matter that much in the grand scheme of things - only 8% of Black people are Catholics. So gaining 14 points among a group that’s 8% of the Black population yields a shift in aggregate votes of about one percent. The fact that Black Protestants and Black nones have shifted a couple of points towards the Republicans results in real differences on election day.

Let me try and dig one layer down and show you the voting patterns of four major Black Church denominations - the National Baptist Convention, the Baptist Missionary Association, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Church of God in Christ.

First, a word of caution. These are not huge samples. For instance there were only 65 AME respondents who said they voted in 2024, out of a total sample of 60,000 people. But this is about as good as I can do with the data that is available to me.

There’s a whole lot of blue to be found. For instance, check the results from the AME respondents. In five different election cycles, I can find a total of four respondents who voted for the Republican. It may be the most politically unified denomination that I’ve ever seen in doing this data work for twenty years. For the Baptist Missionary Association, they’ve consistently been 75-80% for the Democrats. That was true before and after Donald Trump was on the ballot.

The National Baptist Convention is an interesting one. Historically speaking, about 90% of that denomination supported the Democratic party. That was certainly the case in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. But then in 2024, there was a big shift. Trump got a third of their votes. The sample size is about 150 respondents, too, which is very consistent over the last five surveys. And they weren’t alone in this shift. Among COGIC respondents, they have been trending toward the GOP for a while now. Romney got 9% of their votes. Then Trump earned 18% in 2016, 26% in 2020, and 42% in 2024. To me, that’s some evidence that suggests the Black Protestant vote is no longer uniformly Democratic.

So why have there been cracks forming in the alliance between the Black Church and the Democratic party? I have a theory - the Democratic party has moved significantly to the right on social issues in a way that makes Black Christians feel alienated from the messages that they hear from DNC leadership. Let me show you what I mean. I compared the views of the average Democrat with the views of the Black Christians in the sample.

You can see that there are huge gaps on all kinds of issues. On abortion, 41% of Black Christians want to ban abortion pills sent by mail - that’s 24 points higher than the Democrats as a whole. While just 8% of Democrats want to criminalize women crossing state lines to seek an abortion, it’s 25% of Black Christians.

When it comes to a ban on gender transition treatment for children, a solid majority of Black Christians are in favor - 58%. That’s twenty points higher than the Democrats as a whole. And 70% of Black Christians believe that school districts should seek parental consent before using a different set of pronouns for their child, compared to 39% of all Democrats. A Black Christian is thirty points more likely to support school vouchers and 16 points more willing to say that porn websites should be required to seek age verification before allowing access to visitors.

I think it’s pretty evident to me from these results that the cultural norms of the median Democrat are far out of step with the average Black Christian (85% of which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024). This may be a potential reason why some voters have defected from the Democratic party in the last couple of election cycles.

Let me try to make the case for this theory by showing you the graph below.

I created an index of social conservatism. A score of six would indicate agreement with all of the questions in the above graph. These are Black Christians who look a lot like white evangelicals and traditional Catholics. A score of zero means as social liberally as this scale allows. To help you understand the distribution of Black Christians on this scale, I put the percentage of the entire sample that fit into each bucket below the bars.

It should come as no surprise that those Black Christians who scored lower on the social conservatism index were less likely to vote for Donald Trump. But as those scores rose, so did Trump’s support. He earned about 10% of the votes of Black Christians who scored a 3 or 4 on this index (which is half of the entire sample, by the way). While only about 20% of the sample scored at least a 5 on this 6 point scale, but Trump did very well with this group - he got nearly one third of their votes.

For reasons that I can’t fully understand there’s a clear inflection point in this data between 4 and 5. Just moving up that one point on the scale means Trump gets nearly three times as many votes. So, when we talk about the voting patterns of Black Christians, I think it’s helpful to sort those voters into socially conservative and socially moderate/liberal.

I think that comes into sharper focus when looking at how each of these two categories of Black Christians see the political world of the United States. Folks are asked to place a bunch of people and groups on a scale that runs from very liberal to very conservative. Here’s what that looks like:

Let me point out something really quick that may be easy to miss - if anyone calls Black Protestants politically liberal they have no idea what they are talking about. In the entire sample, Black Protestants place themselves smack in the middle of the scale. They are the definition of ‘middle of the road.’ They are moderate Democrats. Those are just the facts.

But there are differences between these two types of Black Christians. Among those who score a 5 or 6 on the social conservatism scale, they are half a point right of center. Among those who score lower they are just a bit to the left of the midpoint. But what strikes me as fascinating is where these two groups put Kamala Harris - it’s the exact same spot. On a scale from 1 to 7, she’s at a 3.5. Half a point left of center. Neither group sees her as super liberal.

But also notice that the social conservatives see the Republicans and Trump as more moderate than the socially moderates/liberals. I am struck by how the social conservatives just see a political landscape that is not that polarized at all. And they place themselves near the midpoint between the Democrats and the Republicans. They feel pulled in both directions.

Is there a racial realignment happening in American politics? I don’t know if I buy that when looking at these results. Yes, the Black vote has moved slightly towards the GOP, but it’s in very small numbers. If that’s due to the ascendance of Donald Trump, then it’s likely that this will be a temporary blip. If it’s because Black Christians are being drawn to the ideology of the Republican party, then it’s a whole different story.

Code for this post can be found here.