Friday, November 6, 2026

Religion and the Midterm

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

Alec Dent and Dan Merica at WP:

President Donald Trump was propelled to the White House twice thanks in large part to how completely he won support from white Christians. Over the last few years, Democratic leaders have tried to find a way to challenge the narrative that the party is hostile to peoples of faith.

For example, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) a pastor at Atlanta’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church and a key figure in this effort, has called for Democrats of faith not to shy away from talking about its influence in their lives.

This year, two Senate candidates with hopes of flipping seats long held by the GOP — James Talarico and Adam Hamilton — took that advice to heart and made their Christian faith a prominent part of their winning campaigns.

Talarico, now a senator-elect in Texas, is a Presbyterian seminary graduate, and often spoke of “loving thy neighbor” on the campaign trail. Hamilton, the first Kansas Democrat to win a Senate seat in generations, is a Methodist minister with a megachurch who has spoken about trying to be Christ-like in his approach to government.

Several House candidates — like Iowa’s Sarah Trone Garriott and Texas’s Frederick Douglass Haynes III, both ministers — took a similar approach.

The effort seems to have paid off; religious Democrats won up and down the ballot. And an NORC voter survey suggests shifts toward Democrats this cycle; 4 percent of self-described born-again Christians who backed a GOP House candidate in 2022 supported a Democrat this time, for instance, while 6 percent of Catholics and 6 percent of Protestants who backed Trump in 2024 said they backed Democratic Senate candidates this time
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