During the last month, Christians for Kamala joined the ranks of groups supporting Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. In so doing, they stand beside groups as wide-ranging as Comics for Kamala and Deadheads for Kamala. Because Harris has shown she will include us all in her vision for the United States and bring together what has been torn apart, all of these groups have seized upon the newfound enthusiasm among the electorate since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July and endorsed Harris.
A religious coalition such as this entering the chat is an important step in the right direction and could help sway religious voters in battleground states.
A religious coalition such as this entering the chat is an important step in the right direction, and, if built upon, could help sway enough movable religious voters in critical battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. What’s more, it could mean breaking the stronghold that MAGA forces have on many of our country’s evangelical voters. Thanks in part to the cooperation of so many self-identified Christian voters, the MAGA movement has seized control of the Republican Party and helped lead our country down a dark, democracy-threatening path.
Former President Donald Trump and his team know this, and it’s at the core of their strategy in the lead-up to the November election. Compared with 2016, an erosion of his support from white men was Trump’s biggest problem in 2020, and his campaign is working overtime to fix that in 2024. In many places, this means courting white Christian men, especially from the evangelical and Catholic traditions. That’s one of the reasons he picked Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who converted to Catholicism five years ago, as his running mate.
Central to our work at Vote Common Good, I spend a lot of my time traveling the country speaking to voters, particularly evangelical and Catholic voters who are hardwired into voting Republican, working to get them to break out of those patterns. What I’ve learned is that most don’t want or need their elected leader to be like them, but they really do want their leader to like them. It wasn’t clear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton liked evangelical and Catholic men when she ran for president in 2016, and it remains largely unclear to many of these voters in 2024 if Kamala Harris does. Trump, on the other hand, probably doesn’t like them, but he put his arms around these voters in a transactional exchange, and he promised and in some cases delivered them power.
But on the trail in 2020, 2022 and this year, I’ve gleaned the reason many evangelical and Christian voters ultimately leave Trump: his obvious lack of kindness. A poll that my organization Vote Common Good commissioned in 2020 showed that in swing states, Trump’s lack of kindness was driving evangelical and Catholic voters away in large enough numbers to potentially affect the outcome of the election.
Voters typically realize that the way they vote reflects on them. And those religious voters who defected from Trump didn’t like the way his unkindness reflected on them, whether it be putting migrant children in cages, the way he treats women, the way he treats the press, the way he treats nearly everyone who left his administration and the way he treats democracy itself. Many of these voters know that’s not the behavior they want their children to emulate.
The Harris campaign clearly knows it has an opportunity here. The choice of Tim Walz as vice presidential nominee is in no small part evidence of that. But it isn’t nearly enough. Democrats more broadly need to embrace the idea that evangelicals, and especially white male evangelicals, are worth winning and can be won without the party compromising its values.
What Democrats are pushing for lines up with the values evangelicals hold dear: making the world better and bringing people together.
What it’s going to take is a concerted, grassroots effort to reach these voters, listen to them and bring them along on a journey to help them understand it’s OK for them to let concern for the common good, and not allegiance to a political party, determine how they vote. We need to tell them that what Democrats are pushing for lines up with the values evangelicals hold dear — making the world better and bringing people together. Those policies include commonsense gun reform to keep kids safe, engaging solutions at the border and lowering the cost of child care. Many Christians are heartbroken at the idea that they have to choose between a faith that’s meaningful to them and a political identity that has been wedded to it. They don’t know what to do, and we need to help them separate those two identities.
It will take an effort like the one we made in Kent County, Mich., home to Grand Rapids and several Christian universities, before the 2020 election. We held voter rallies and roundtables; put up billboards juxtaposing the words of Jesus Christ with those of Trump; sent thousands of postcards to evangelical voters; and trained multiple local Democratic candidates on how to engage with faith voters. Our message to the 25% of the Kent County electorate that identified as evangelical was simple: Trump lacks kindness and it’s OK not to vote for the Republican. Trump beat Clinton by 3 points in Kent County in 2016. In 2020, he lost to Biden there by 6 points, a 9-point swing. I always believed a shift like that was possible, and I was at the convention in Chicago telling everyone who would listen the Kent County story and making the case that we cannot ignore evangelical voters. My efforts included being on a panel focused on how to move gettable voters. I think it’s possible for Harris to receive the highest level of evangelical support since Carter. Biden did better than Hillary Clinton did with evangelical voters, and if we come together and don’t leave these folks to Trump, I think it’s possible for Harris to receive the highest level of evangelical support since Jimmy Carter got roughly half the evangelical vote in 1976. And if that were to happen, it would break the back of the MAGA movement. Now that the convention is over, we’ll be fueling up our bus, hitting the road and driving to Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and back to some of those same places again. We won’t leave movable voters out there on their own. We’ll let them know that they can make that switch, and they won’t be shunned or punished for it. We won’t give up on them, because they can help save our country from the antidemocratic policies the MAGA movement has been unleashing. Christians for Kamala, which I’m a part of, will make sure Christian faith voters are engaged in the political process.
Doug Pagitt
Doug Pagitt is executive director of Vote Common Good and an evangelical pastor from Minneapolis. 
