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U.S. Election not about economic anxiety, it’s about religious identity anxiety

U.S. Election not about economic anxiety, it’s about religious identity anxiety


Evangelicals and Christian nationalists played a large role in the re-election of Donald Trump, with equality and the economy taking a backseat to the church, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

U.S. SENATOR Bernie Sanders is wrong when he says the Democrats lost because they do not know how to speak to the working class. The actual reason is far more complex than that.

To understand why Donald Trump won the Presidency again, the first thing you need to accept is that voters – whether Republican or Democrat – are not voting based on crude, rational economic assessments. They are voting on the vibe.

The second thing is that this vibe has far more to do with what type of country they want America to be and their identity within it than it has to do with specific policies, the quality of campaigns, or the performance of candidates.

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The final thing is – and this is the big one – it’s time to stop assuming that all voters experiencing a range of inequalities impacting their position in America – including economic, educational, housing and opportunity inequality – will vote for the party promising to address inequality.

Analysis of Trump’s 2024 voters shows that a large number of people experiencing inequality chose Trump specifically because he opposes equality. This phenomenon was particularly prominent in religious communities.

Just to show how nonsensical it is to assume voters cast their votes based on the state of the economy, or how “well off” they feel, compare 2020 to 2024 NBC News exit polling data on the question: ‘Compared to four years ago, is your family’s financial situation better or worse?’

(Graph supplied)

This shows that in 2020, Democrats thought they were worse off after four years of Trump and Republicans thought they were better off. In 2024, after four years of Biden, this polarised response was reversed. Democrats thought they were better off and Republicans worse off. These are people subjectively experiencing the same economy, through a different identity, media and community lens.

The misconception that Trump’s win shows Democrats have a working-class problem ignores the complexity of identity-based voting and its relationship to inequality. As I’ve written about before, if the Democrats really had a working-class voter problem, why do non-White working-class voters overwhelmingly support Democrats?

The suggested working-class problem is tied to the accusation that Democrats have become the party of “elites”. Elite is now code for “educated”, with people pointing to the fact that Democrats win voting demographics of those with college degrees, whereas Republicans win demographics of those without college degrees.

This graph shows 2024 exit polls demonstrating that Republicans only win the overall share of non-college-educated voters because they win the White cohort of non-college-educated (working class) voters, with a share of 66% to 33%.

(Graph supplied)

The voting cohort of White voters without college degrees is probably the most discussed in all election coverage, treated as the most important and the most loyal to Trump. Part of the reason for this is their size — 2024 exit polls suggest they are 39% of total voters.

Alongside saturation coverage of this cohort’s majority support for Trump, they have been flattened to a stereotypical caricature of rural, White, working-class people who have allegedly lost faith in the Democratic Party because they feel left behind. This trope suggests the impacts of globalisation, technological disruption and widening inequality between professional knowledge economy college-educated workers, which has led working-class Whites to abandon the Democrats and embrace Trump’s regressive call to “make America great again”.

The thing about such simplistic stories is that where they might speak to some people’s views and experiences, they are unlikely to speak to all of them, nor explain the complexities of identity, inequality and what people hear and understand when Trump promises to “make America great again”.

John DiIulio Jr, Professor of Politics, Religion and Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania, helps to unpack the complexities of White, non-college-educated voters, showing a far more nuanced view of what motivates their voting behaviour.

DiIulio Jr demonstrates that White voters can be categorised into four types: college-educated and evangelical; college-educated and not-evangelical; non-college-educated and evangelical; and non-college-educated and not-evangelical. Using NBC exit polling data, the graph below shows how these four cohorts voted in 2016 and 2020.

(Graph supplied)

As this data shows, evangelical White Americans are extremely committed Republican voters, whether non-college-educated or college-educated. What this graph also importantly points out is that non-college-educated White voters who are not evangelical do not vote Republican — they vote Democrat. Thus, Democrats have not lost White working-class voters, they have lost evangelical White working-class voters, or never had them to begin with.

Considering the conservative views of the evangelical faith and particularly their ideological preference for inequality – White people over non-White people and men over women – it is clear why Donald Trump is their pick. Indeed, 2020 Pew Research data showed despite having ‘mixed feelings’ about Trump’s ethics and moral character, the vast majority of White evangelicals support him anyway because they say Trump is ‘fighting for their beliefs and advancing their interests’.

So, what are these interests? Many evangelical Christians are motivated by Christian nationalism, defined as the belief that ‘America is a Christian nation, one that should privilege White, native-born politically conservative Christians’.

Their policy interests include being staunchly anti-abortion, anti-immigration and they are the religious group most likely to deny anthropogenic climate change. Experts are also concerned that this movement is particularly vulnerable to believing disinformation and conspiracy theories.

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These characteristics clearly make this group a perfect fit for the MAGA movement and raise the question of whether the MAGA movement was built for them. Yet, there is more to their support for Trump than just his policies and their unswerving belief in his manipulative lies.

Researcher Anthea Butler, a professor of religion and Africana studies and an expert in Christian Nationalism, argues that ‘sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and transphobia’ are key elements of White evangelical ideology, as well as particularly ‘anti-Black racism’.

What evangelical Republican voters love most about Trump and, in turn, hate about the Democrats, is that Trump opposes equality, while Democrats fight for it.

Exit polls in the 2024 Election show that evangelicals were once again a decisive voting block, representing 22% of the electorate, with 82% supporting Trump (76% supported Trump in 2020). This is despite them representing only 13.6% of the U.S. population, showing they have an outsized influence on the election result.

America’s notoriously neck-and-neck electoral system, where governments are won by small percentages in a handful of states, along with all its undemocratic characteristics, adds another layer of power to White, evangelical voters who are organised in their churches and are aggressively motivated to turn out.

If you’re not already convinced of how influential this group has been on Trump’s rise and his so-called “political comeback”, despite all his obvious personal and political failings, consider the polarised response to the 2024 exit poll question about whether America’s best days are in the past or future.

(Graph supplied)

Kamala Harris promised voters “we are not going back”. White, evangelical voters rejected this view of America. They have no interest in an equal society where your gender and the colour of your skin do not dictate your opportunities. Quite literally, they fight for the opposite.

Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads or Bluesky

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