{"id":3601,"date":"2020-10-11T13:46:10","date_gmt":"2020-10-11T13:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=3601"},"modified":"2020-10-11T13:46:10","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T13:46:10","slug":"more-and-more-americans-arent-religious-why-are-democrats-ignoring-these-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=3601","title":{"rendered":"More And More Americans Aren\u2019t Religious. Why Are Democrats Ignoring These Voters?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“Democrats are mostly ignoring a massive group of voters who are becoming an increasingly crucial part of their base: people who don\u2019t have any religion at all.”
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“The unaffiliated are a key demographic for Democratic candidates in particular. More than one-third of the people who voted for Clinton in 2016 were religiously unaffiliated, making them just as electorally important for Democrats as white evangelical Protestants are for Republicans. Yet despite constantly hearing about the importance of white evangelical voters in an election cycle<\/a>, Democratic politicians have been slow to embrace the growing number of nonreligious people who vote for them. Why?
In the past, the challenges of organizing the religiously unaffiliated have made it easy to understand why Democrats haven\u2019t made a real effort to appeal to them more. As most don\u2019t regularly gather like a church congregation, religiously unaffiliated Americans can be difficult to reach. A lack of institutional leadership also means there aren\u2019t many prominent people or groups showing up to nudge politicians to pay attention to their issues. And despite rising tolerance<\/a> for atheists and nonreligious people in American culture, overt appeals to the nonreligious still run the risk of turning off the majority of voters who are people of faith.” 
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“1 in every 4 Americans who are now religiously unaffiliated, including 40 percent of millennials. Meanwhile, there\u2019s no sign that nonreligious Americans are returning to religion<\/a> as they get older.” 
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“One reason we haven\u2019t heard as much about religiously unaffiliated people is because they are often dismissed as less likely to vote<\/a>, even as their share of the total population has grown. But that perception of nonreligious voters as less engaged could be increasingly wrong, as there are indications that the voting gap between secular and religious Americans has shrunk in recent elections<\/a>.” 
…
“there are ways to make appeals to secular voters that can also speak to religious Democrats \u2014 for example, emphasizing the importance of protecting religious minorities and<\/em> nonreligious people through the separation of church and state, or focusing on science-based issues like climate change. That kind of big-tent strategy isn\u2019t without risk, though. \u201cThe last thing Democrats want is to be portrayed as the godless party, because that would probably turn off a lot of voters,\u201d Campbell said. But he added that Democrats may be missing a big political opportunity if they don\u2019t start thinking about ways to engage with nonreligious voters as a group.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More And More Americans Aren’t Religious. Why Are Democrats Ignoring These Voters?<\/a><\/blockquote>