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(ANALYSIS) Well, Tuesday’s the day.
Thank God.
As Taylor Schumann tweeted recently, “The human body was not built to withstand 3 Trump election cycles.”
The weeks before an election are always some of the busiest of my life. In an average year, I do about 80-100 media interviews. In the run-up to a presidential election, I’ve done three or four in a day. Everyone is looking for another angle on how to cover the same event, and many reporters think that religion and politics is a good topic for a short story.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes bit of information: I don’t have any raw data at my disposal about how religious groups are intending to vote in the 2024 presidential election. However, I do have a way to back into some information about how things should shake out on Nov. 5.
For those who have been following along, you know that one of my favorite data source is the Cooperative Election Study. It’s fielded every year and has a huge sample.
Well, it’s done in a split design in election years with one part being fielded in early October and the rest after the election in November. Brian Schaffner and team managed to do some quick analysis of that October data collection. Their write up of a sample of 78,247 is here.
But they also provided a Shiny Application that shows us some preliminary crosstabs of about 15 different demographics. You can access that with this link. So, here’s what I did: I just replicated anything in that Shiny app that pertains to religion with the data from the prior four elections from the CES.
For those who are wondering, I am using their “likely voter model” percentages for 2024, and in 2016 and 2020, I am using validated voter data. The 2008 and 2012 datasets did not have voter validation, so I am just showing you the normal survey weights.
Let’s start with a broad look at six religious categories, and this is the vote share for the Republican in the last five election cycles.