OMG! The Problem Was White Evangelicals The Whole Time

It hasn't been uneducated white working class men per se who are the backbone holding top the Trumpist Regime... it's been evangelical uneducated white working class men. Keep this in the back of your mind: 45% of all white voters without a college degree self identify as evangelical Christians. Ron Brownstein revealed some fascinating exit poll data that shows the toxic role white working class evangelicals are playing in our politics. "Though Republican candidates almost everywhere registered large margins among white voters without a college degree," he wrote, "Democrats ran much more competitively among the roughly half of that group who are not evangelical Christians [and] particularly well this year among white working-class women who are not evangelicals, a group that also displayed substantial disenchantment in the exit poll with Trump's performance. Those women could be a key constituency for Democrats in 2020 in pivotal Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where relatively fewer blue-collar whites are also evangelical Christians."

Nationwide, nearly three-fifths of blue-collar white women who are not evangelicals voted Democratic in last month's House races, while an equal number said they disapproved of Trump's performance in office, the analysis of exit poll results found. That was well over double the Democratic share of the vote among non-college white women who are evangelical Christians. And while Republicans last month still carried a majority among working-class white men who are not evangelicals, Democrats attracted about twice as much support from them as they did among the equivalent men who are evangelicals.

"It's another overlay to the conclusion that there are some parts of the white non-college population that are open to Democrats and can be moved a few points in your direction," says Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic analyst of voting trends who now serves as a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.

...At issue is how much emphasis the party should place on trying to recapture white working-class voters as opposed to maximizing turnout among its new base of minority, millennial and college-educated white voters, especially women and those in urban areas.

While some Democrats have come to view white working-class voters as largely a lost cause for the party in the Trump era, other party strategists, including some affiliated with organized labor, have privately argued that the large number of staunchly conservative evangelical Christians in the group has overstated Democratic weakness among them.

Strategists in this camp argue it would be a mistake for the party to downplay outreach to white working-class voters who are not evangelicals, especially the women in that group.

The detailed exit poll results provided to CNN show clear openings for Democrats with some groups of white working-class voters. But they also indicate that Democrats still face significant headwinds with most of those blue-collar whites and that white evangelical Christians look increasingly monolithic in their support for Republicans. That's a big challenge for Democrats in many southern states, where half or more of working-class whites are also evangelical Christians.

...To start, this analysis underscores how many white working-class voters are also evangelical Christians. Nationwide, the exit poll found that evangelical Christians this year comprised fully 45% of all white voters without a college degree, a substantial portion of the total electorate. By contrast, evangelicals represented only one-fourth of college-educated white voters. (In 2016, the exit polls found that evangelicals constituted slightly larger shares of each group.)

In all of the southern states where the question was asked this year, evangelicals represented a majority of working-class white voters, including fully two-thirds in Georgia and Tennessee. Evangelicals were also a majority of white working class voters in West Virginia and Indiana and exactly half in Missouri.

That's a big hill for Democrats in those states, because the exit poll results show that they face virtually monolithic opposition from all segments of the evangelical community.

At least 77% of white evangelicals without a college degree voted against the Democratic Senate candidates in Florida, Missouri and Tennessee, while 72% opposed defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly in Indiana, the exit polls found. In the Georgia governor's race, a breathtaking 89% of non-college white evangelicals voted for Republican Brian Kemp over African-American Democrat Stacey Abrams; 84% of those voters picked Ted Cruz over O'Rourke in Texas. Only Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia ran competitively, losing those voters by a narrow 52% to 46% margin.

In House races, the exit polls found that exactly three-fourths of white evangelicals without a college degree voted Republican, while only about one-fifth supported Democrats. Democrats lost the men in this group by 57 percentage points and the women by a still daunting 49 points.

...In Public Religion Research Institute, surveys... evangelical Christians have declined from about 21% of the total population in 2008 to 15% this year. That erosion, Jones says, has been "asymmetrical," with younger and better-educated members becoming the most likely to leave the faith. That's left behind a group that is older and more uniformly conservative.

"As this group is shrinking and aging it is just becoming more and more homogenous," says Robert Jones, author of the 2017 book The End of White Christian America. "When you have that kind of attrition, and it's coming all from the low [younger] end, and the low end is more likely to be college educated and likely to be more liberal on a whole range of cultural issues and less anti-immigrant... you start losing differences."

But if the 2018 election results highlight the solidifying uniformity of white evangelicals-- male and female, college-educated or not-- the findings simultaneously illuminate pressing reasons for Republican concern about white voters who are not evangelicals, both those with and without college degrees.

Although Democrats this year posted their best recent showing among white voters holding at least a four-year college degree, the GOP's continuing strength among such well-educated white evangelicals obscured the full extent of the party's decline.

In the national House exit poll, Democrats carried fully two-thirds of college-educated whites that are not evangelical Christians. That included not only a head-turning 71% of college educated white women who are not evangelicals but also 59% of the equivalent men. The shares that said they disapproved of Trump's performance were even higher in both groups: 74% of the women and 63% of the men.

Democrats carried about three-fifths of these non-evangelical white-collar whites in the Florida Senate race and about two-thirds of them in Indiana, Tennessee and Missouri. Even in Texas, O'Rourke carried 61% of them, while Abrams won 55% of them in the Georgia governor's race. Those geographically dispersed results testify to the breadth of the recoil from the Trump-era GOP among these well-educated white voters that Republicans in an earlier generation considered part of their base.

In a process that Trump has accelerated, Republicans in this century have instead come to see whites without a college degree as the foundation of their support. But the detailed results from Edison show some cracks in that base among the working-class whites that are not evangelicals.

In the national House exit poll, Democrats actually carried a slim 52% to 46% majority among non-college whites who are not evangelicals, though with a significant gender gap. While Democrats won the blue-collar women who are not evangelicals by 16 percentage points, Republicans won the equivalent men by 9 points.

Frank Schaeffer knows more about the evangelical community-- and the evangelical con-- than anyone I know. This is how he explained it to me this morning: "Empire builders are empire builders, and entertainers are entertainers, regardless of what they call themselves. That’s why Trump and the evangelical leaders understood each other. The average uneducated white evangelical male voter has been looking for entertainment value for generations in church. The televangelists provided it. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Walt Disney Company are a perfect match. Mea culpa! I only understood the reality of the symbiotic relationship between the consumer/entertainment culture and our star religious-empire builders after I quit being one myself. Judging by the many emails I’m getting from pastors who have read my Calvin Becker Trilogy of novels (which are humorous stories about a preacher’s family, seen from the inside), it seems that many a preacher is in the position of Groucho Marx. Groucho said he’d never want to belong to a club that would let someone like him join. The doubt and self-loathing expressed to me by so many pastors is amazing. Of course, they all beg me never to tell anyone what they are telling me. The con is the same one Trump perpetuates of 'success.' Go will make you rich like he made me rich is the prosperity gospel hook for the dumb. No wonder they fell for the same con from Trump."

 And evangelical women aren't the only women giving Republican leaders a headache. Republican congresswoman are too. Rachael Bade and Sarah Ferris, writing for Politico, reported that "Several Republican women are preparing their own plans to help their female colleagues, support women candidates and woo suburban women just in case nobody listens. Wagner, for example, is about to relaunch a “suburban caucus” in the House. The group will craft an agenda aimed at winning back suburban women by promoting issues like paid family leave and child care tax credits." That's Ann Wagner, who represents Missouri's 2nd district, the St. Louis suburbs. On paper, the district is still comfortably Republican-- with a nearly unassailable R+8 PVI. Obama was defeated there both times he ran and Trump beat Hillary by 10 points-- 52.6% to 42.3%. But... last month Wagner had a tough reelection campaign against Democrat Cort VanOstran. She did beat him-- 190,008 (51.3%) to 174,486 (47.1%), but in the St. Louis County portion of the district (which is over 70% of the population), the margin was razor thin, despite her spending $4,115,076 to his $2,334,726. This year the DCCC spent nothing in MO-02. That's unlikely to be the case in 2020.

Wagner isn't alone in turning her attention towards electing more Republican women to Congress. New York Republican Elise Stefanik is doing the same thing, and in primaries no less. That means she'll be backing Republican women against Republican men in primaries. In GOP-land that is an unforgivable heresy. But Republican congresswomen are angry. In the same year Congress finally got around to designating a bathroom for women off the House floor (2011), there were 76 women serving in the House. Starting in January, there will be 103. The problem is that almost 90% of them are Democrats-- more like super-progressive leaders Alexandria Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayssa Pressley, Deb Haaland and Katie Porter than like reactionary shrews Virginia Foxx, Diane Black, Claudia Tenney and Liz Cheney.

“I am going to keep pointing out to my colleagues that we are at a crisis level for GOP women,” Stefanik said in a recent interview. “This election should be a wake-up call to Republicans that we need to do better … We need to be elevating women’s voices, not suppressing them.”

In interviews with Politico, Republican women were divided about whether GOP leaders and their male colleagues were getting the message. In one of his first moves as NRCC chairman-elect, for example, Tom Emmer told a reporter Stefanik’s idea to help female candidates in primaries was “a mistake.”

...“I’m sorry-- Tom Emmer is wrong on this one,” said retiring Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee, who supported Stefanik in her first election and supports her primary idea. “To say what Elise is doing is a mistake? We need to applaud her. She’s filling a void.”

She added: “OK, the NRCC’s policy is that they are not going to help in the primary ... But if [women] don’t get out of the primary, what good is that?”

Stefanik, for her part, tweeted Emmer’ comments out with a bit of her own sass:

...[T]he NRCC has been on the defensive since Emmer’s comments, which come as the number of House GOP women is set to drop to the lowest number since 1994. When he takes office, Emmer plans to sit down with all 13 remaining GOP women for a candid tell-all “listening session” about what went wrong in 2018, according to an NRCC aide.

“You can’t not recognize the problem, the numbers are so terrible,” said an NRCC aide.

But it’s unclear whether that will be enough. Some women like Wagner are still frustrated that the gravity of the situation has yet to sink in, arguing that “I have seen no sign” of reflection. Even Stefanik is pushing her colleagues to conduct an “autopsy” of what happened and why they lost so many female voters and lawmakers this year.