2024 Election Post-Mortem: Nothing in Particulars

When I talk about the size of the “nones,” I see this really interesting conflict play out among the scores of non-religious people in the United States. Whenever I show a graph that indicates that people with the most education are the least likely to identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, a lot of people from the first two categories get very upset with me. They slide into my DMs claiming my measurement is incorrect because it includes all three categories of non-religion. They want me to restrict my analysis to just atheists and agnostics. (And if you do that, the relationship flips: the most educated are more likely to identify as atheists or agnostics).

But when I make a graph showing the rise of the nones over time if I only include atheists and agnostics in my calculation, the share of nones has only risen to about 12% over time. If I throw the third category in there - the nothing in particulars - the nones are much, much larger. Somewhere between 30% and 35%. So, you can see the dilemma here. Many atheists want to include the “nothing in particulars” when it makes secularism appear more significant, but want to exclude them in other analyses. Which is really par for the course among nothing in particulars because I think that they are the most overlooked, understudied ‘religious’ group in the United States. And they absolutely have a huge impact on American politics.

It’s important to give people a sense of this group’s size, lest they assume I’m referring to a fringe element of the American religious landscape.

In 2008, 14% of the sample said that they were nothing in particular. It rose quickly from there. I think it’s fair to say that the correct percentage of nothing in particulars was likely about 20% of the general public from 2010 through 2018 or so. But then that figure began to rise again between 2019 and 2023. It’s very fair to say that they were just slightly less than a quarter of the population during this five year window. But the 2024 result is a bit of a head-scratcher - dropping back down to 21%. Is this a huge drop in the nones? We absolutely should not make such a claim based on a single data point. A 3-4 point drop in one year is just not realistic. Now, if the 2025 sample is 20% nothing in particulars, now we can talk about this as a real trend.

However, I feel like I need to contextualize this result even more by comparing nothing in particulars to other religious groups. In the 2024 data, just 18% of the sample were Catholic. Yes, there are now more “nothing in particulars” than Catholics in the United States. And there are almost as many nothing in particulars as there evangelicals, as well - 21% vs 22%. If you add up all the LDS, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists you get 6% of the country. Among people born in 2000 or later, the most popular response option is nothing in particular - it’s 28% compared to only 22% who say that they are Protestants.

Do you see the point? It’s astonishing to me that this group is not more well known by the average American.

So, it’s this huge group - the data is incredibly clear on that fact. There may be 70 million people who identify as nothing in particular. That’s a whole lot of potential voters, more than enough to sway an election. But what are their politics?

They are undoubtedly a left-leaning voting bloc. In 2008, 70% of them cast a ballot for Barack Obama - he bested McCain by 42 points among nothing in particulars. Now, it is fair to say that Republicans have made some inroads with this group over time. Romney improved by five points over McCain, and Trump gained another six in 2016. But I want you to look at the last couple of election cycles. Trump’s share goes from 39% in 2016 to 34% in 2020 back up to 38% in 2024. All those figures are better than the previous Republican nominees.

But notice the see saw pattern? Trump did relatively well in 2016 and 2024. He didn’t fare so well in 2020. And guess which election that he lost? Now, I know that I can’t say for certain if any one specific voting bloc really did throw the election to one party or the other but it does seem really convenient to me that the nothing in particulars were five points more Republican in the two elections that Trump won compared to the 2020 contest with Joe Biden. Remember, these are a whole lot of raw votes to be had.

Yet, there’s a caveat here that I would be remiss to not point out. Nothing in particulars tend to be a group that has historically been apathetic about the political process. That’s actually a central theme of my book The Nones - nothing in particulars are largely disengaged from American society. That’s something that also comes through in this Pew report. According to their data from the 2022 midterms, just 32% of nothing in particulars voted in the election compared to 50% of atheists, 49% of agnostics and 51% of religiously affiliated Americans.

You can clearly see that their engagement lags behind in data from the Cooperative Election Study, too.

In both 2020 and 2024, a nothing in particular was about half as likely to attend a political meeting as a typical American. They were 8 points less inclined to contact a public official in 2020 and 4 points lower in 2024. Just 22% of them donated to a candidate in 2020 and that dropped to only 15% in 2024. Both much lower than the average citizen. You can see it all the way across the board - nothing in particulars just don’t engage in very low effort and low cost political activities like putting up a yard sign or bumper sticker. Only 12% did so in 2024.

If I were sitting at the DNC HQ and thinking about what happened in the 2024 election and why Harris didn’t win the White House, I think one of the answers lies with this large group of nothing in particulars. Trump managed to get back to that 38-39% threshold that he needed. Which was crucial for him, but I think the bigger problem here is turnout. Nothing in particulars were clearly disengaged with what was happening in 2024. Democrats need this group to show up in big numbers to have a chance in national elections. That just didn’t happen.

Of course there’s a very good reason that nothing in particulars weren’t incredibly tuned in to the political process in 2020 and 2024 - their very low levels of educational attainment. One thing that we basically ‘know’ in political science is that educated people are more likely to engage in political activity than less educated folks. And it just so happens that nothing in particulars have the lowest level of college degrees of any religious group in the sample.

In 2008, just 16% of them had earned a four year college degree. That was 2-3 points lower than evangelicals and non-white Catholics. For reference, in the entire sample about a quarter had earned a bachelor’s degree. This is also why I think it’s methodological nonsense to lump nothing in particulars together with atheists and agnostics. Those latter groups have very high levels of education. It’s like they are in different corners of the socioeconomic landscape compared to nothing in particulars.

You also need to take note of the fact that nothing in particulars have never really managed to make up this education deficit. The share with a bachelor’s degree only rose 8 percentage points between 2008 and 2024. It was ten points in the entire sample. Even today, the nothing in particulars are the least educated ‘religious’ group in the United States. They are nine points behind white evangelicals, and nearly twenty points behind white Catholics. An atheist in 2024 was twice as likely to have a bachelor’s degree compared to a nothing in particular.

But I also tend to think that this is a reason that nothing in particulars could easily slip into being a Republican constituency in the future - having a lower level of education is strongly related to a lower level of household income. Trump made his campaign largely about the issue of inflation, which tends to be most acutely felt among folks at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum. To test that, I broke the sample down into income categories and calculated Trump’s vote share among all Christians and then the nothing in particulars.

What’s undoubtedly true is that Christians felt much warmer to Donald Trump than nothing in particulars, regardless of household income. In many cases the gap was about twenty percentage points. So, from this angle one could make the claim that being a Christian shifts the likelihood of voting for the Republican up by about 15-20 points. That gap is also bigger when comparing those at the top end of the income spectrum. Among folks making six figures, the gap expanded to 30 points, largely due to nothing in particulars shifting even further toward the left.

Also note the trend from left to right on the graph. For Christians, income stops mattering that much once you get to about $50,000 per year. At this point, two-thirds of Christian backed Donald Trump. That’s not really the case for nothing in particulars - the trend line looks much more curvilinear. Among nothing in particulars, the middle incomes were the most Republican and that figure started to slide once household income rose to about $60,000 or more.

In my view, “nothing in particulars” are the most fertile ground for future political campaigns. It’s a group of disaffected, detached, and disengaged voters. There are also a whole lot of them. They seem pretty predisposed to voting for Democrats. I think in a generic election they are D+25, but if that slips at all, the Republican has a chance to win. That’s exactly what happened in 2024, when Trump narrowed the gap to just 21 points.

However, unlike atheists, Latter-day Saints, Jews, and evangelicals, this is a group that is nearly impossible to find gathering anywhere. There’s no National Association of “Nothing in Particulars.” But if some political campaign or candidate could manage to activate this group in large numbers, they would almost certainly carry them to victory on election day.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.