Are There Any Religion Lessons from the 2024 Election?
No, I don't have the data that I really want just yet.
A really frustrating feeling is when people ask me to comment on something when I just don’t have the data to do so. I don’t like to conjecture or speculate - I just like to stick close to the data. That doesn’t mean that the data is always right, but at least it seems a bit more foundational than just pontificating from the top of my head. As I tell my students often, we aren’t pundits. We don’t have opinions, we have data that was collected in a rigorous way and analyzed using sophisticated, empirical techniques.
Any presidential election causes a real problem for me. I do get asked to talk to reporters and do webinars and write pieces for major outlets about the role that faith played at the ballot box. There’s an issue - I just don’t have access to any reliable data for a very long time after an election. Yes, I know there are exit polls. I pay very little attention to those. They are not academically rigorous. The really good data comes from the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study. They usually release their data from a presidential election in March or April of the following year.
So, I am living in this information black hole now. Heck, it’s even hard to collect county level election results at this point and it’s been weeks since polls closed. Here’s a stunning fact - the only way that the Associated Press can grab that information so quickly is because they station reporters at nearly 4,000 election offices across the country. There’s no central repository for this stuff. It’s all done by hand. There's no official source yet. The best I’ve found is this GitHub repository where the author just scraped the data from the Fox News website.
I will post his disclaimer here: “Although the data in this repository is extensive, it is not considered the authoritative source. Researchers are encouraged to verify specific results from primary data sources when needed.”
So, let’s just get to the map, shall we?
I don’t know about you, but that huge blob of red that runs nearly vertical across the center of the country jumps out to me. It extends from central Texas all the way up through the Dakotas. I think it’s possible, but not easy, to drive from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and never leave a county that wasn’t at least 80% for Donald Trump in November. Pretty amazing. But that red blob also stretches eastward, too. There’s a huge pocket in Missouri, then it picks up again in Kentucky and extends downward into the northern part of Alabama and Mississippi.
What about the blue? I think if there’s one simple description it’s the coasts. You can see a whole lot of blue pockets up the eastern seaboard. There’s a lot in the Research Triangle in North Carolina then that blue line snakes its way up through Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston. But a lot of New England is pretty blue, to be honest. There are also a lot of places in California that are Harris country and a big chunk of the coastal Pacific Northwest.
I think we all know that Trump did a lot better in 2024 compared to 2020, pretty much everywhere. But I wanted to visualize that. So, here’s Trump’s vote share in 2024 subtracted from the 2020 totals.
When I hit “build” on this map I was hoping for something really spectacular. Man, I was so disappointed. That’s a lot of really pale red. It’s basically most of the country. These are counties where Trump did between 0% and 5% better in 2024 compared to four years earlier. You want raw numbers on this, don’t you? I had 3,152 counties in my dataset. In 2,730 of them, Trump fell into this bucket of 0 to 5% improvement. That’s about 87% of all counties. You want to guess what the median shift in voting was between 2020 and 2024? It was Trump +1.8%. That’s it. But that’s all it took to win pretty easily in November. There were only 112 counties in which Trump improved by at least 5 points. That’s just 3.6% of all counties nationwide.
Where did Harris do better? You have to look west, really. There are some counties in rural Colorado and Utah where she made some gains compared to Biden four years earlier. You can also see some little blue specks in northern Georgia and through the Carolinas. But, it’s really trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s like Trump just moved the entire map about two points in his direction in 2024.
But, I know what you are thinking - where’s religion in this story? Well, let me give it my best shot, understanding that I don’t have individual level survey data. But what I do have is the Religion Census, which was collected in 2020 and has a county by county breakdown of the religious composition of the country. It’s done by contacting houses of worship, so it’s based on membership data. So, I mashed together the previous data about voting shifts between 2020 and 2024 with the share of each county that was attached to a house of worship. Here’s what that looks like.
So, here’s the big problem with this data - the x-axis is so incredibly concentrated around a single spot in the distribution. Remember, the median was about 1.8 points toward Trump. I mean, 30% of the sample falls between 1% and 2% in the GOP direction in 2024. So, that makes it really hard to shoot a trend line through this kind of data. The outliers really start to have a huge sway on the direction of the relationship.
I mean, you can absolutely see that the line is tilting upwards. In layman’s terms that means that in counties with a higher concentration of religious people, Trump saw a jump in his vote share in 2024 compared to 2020. In a simple bivariate regression here’s what I get - for every percentage point increase in religious adherence, Trump did about .5% better. So a ten point jump in a county’s religiosity would have moved the vote share toward the GOP about about 5.5 percentage points. But, again, the concentration of data right around the single point makes it hard to feel really good about this.
But here’s something that I thought might be really insightful - I wanted to look at the counties on both extremes - those who made big moves toward Trump and big moves away from him between 2020 and 2024. So, let me start by showing you the nine counties in the data where Trump did at least 10 points better.
There are two clear things that jump out at me on this graph. The first is helped by the color coding based on region. Texas shows up in six of these nine counties. This is part of a huge trend in Texas. The state has 254 counties - 233 became redder in 2024. In Maverick County, Trump did 14 points better in 2024 versus 2020. In 2016, Hillary Clinton earned 77% of the votes cast there. In 2024, Kamala Harris earned just 41% of their voters. A 36 point swing in just two election cycles. But there’s a commonality between a lot of these counties in Texas - they all share a border with Mexico.
There’s another thing that all nine of these counties have in common, too. The largest religious tradition is the Catholic Church. Anyone paying attention should have picked up on what I haven’t mentioned to this point - race. Starr county is 98% Hispanic. It’s 95% of Webb county. In fact there’s not a single county from Texas on this list that isn’t at least 82% Hispanic. Hispanic Catholics are shifting to Republicans, at least in Texas. There’s no other way these numbers make sense. In Bronx County, NY it’s 57% Hispanic, 28% Black and just 8% white. In Queens County, Asian, Hispanic and White populations all range between 22% and 28%. Imperial County, California is 86% Hispanic. You get the point here.
What about the counties that moved the most in the other direction? I first need to point out that the magnitude of these shifts is a lot smaller - between 2.7% and 6.4% in the direction of Kamala Harris.
I don’t know if there’s any real pattern to speak of in this data. There’s Michigan, South Dakota, Colorado, and Oklahoma in this table. It's a real mish-mash of places. The largest religious tradition is a bit all over the place. The LDS dominate in one county, the Southern Baptists show up in five of the ten, but the Catholic Church is the largest in three others. I just can't find a religion story in this data.
It’s also fair to point out that a lot of these counties just aren’t that big, either. Leelanau county is in the far northern part of the state and only has a population of 23,000. On the other hand, Henry County, Georgia is about a quarter million folks who live southeast of Atlanta. I think it would be hard to look at this table of counties and offer any sweeping advice to the Democrats if they were doing a full autopsy of what went wrong in the 2024 cycle. There’s just not a clear throughline to be found.
I hope that this can whet the appetite just a little bit before the really good data is published in a couple of months. You better believe that I am going to slice and dice it every way possible to tell the most compelling story about what happened with religion and politics in 2024.
Code for this post can be found here.
It looks like there's a spot around Connecticut colored deep blue in the shift map, suggesting the vote there moved away from Trump by at least 15% between 2020 and 2024, but I don't see those counties listed in (what I think is) the corresponding table. Am I missing something?
Agree with you that Roman Catholicism has little to do with those Texas border county results. It’s that are greatly harmed by Biden border policies. As you probably know, these are astounding results. Places like Star County haven’t voted Republican in our lifetimes. Heck in our grandparents’ lifetimes!