Pew gap in blue America? David French and Ryan Burge offer much to think about — GetReligion
If you have followed GetReligion over the past decade or two then you have probably spotted some common themes linked to ongoing news trends (and I’m not talking about the musings of one Bill “Kellerism” Keller).
Here is a quick refresher with a few big ones:
* The press tends to ignore the RELIGION side of liberal faith groups, focusing only on their political stands.
* One of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century was the demographic implosion of Mainline Protestantism, leaving a public-square void filled, for the most part, by evangelicals.
* The rise of nondenominational evangelicals, with zero ties to existing evangelical power structures, has really confused lots of political reporters.
* It’s hard to do accurate, balanced, fair-minded journalism in an age when the technology pushes people into concrete media silos full of true believers. Preaching to the choir, alas, is good for business (but not for America).
* Newsroom managers need to hire experienced, trained religion-beat pros. That helps prevent lots of tone-deaf mistakes.
Here is one more. The political “pew gap” is real. Citizens who are committed members of traditional faiths tend to have radically different beliefs than those who are not. All together now: “Blue Movie.”
This brings me to a rare business-week “think piece” built on a remarkable David French piece at The Dispatch that will be helpful to journalists who are — to name one trend GetReligion jumped on in 2016 — trying to make sense of the changing choices of Latino (as opposed to Latinx) voters. After watching the chatter on Twitter, I have added two relevant tweet-charts from Ryan Burge, a helpful scholar who cooperates with GetReligion. That French headline:
The God Gap Helps Explain a ‘Seismic Shift’ in American Politics
The most important religious divide isn’t between right and left, but between left and left
The Big Idea: A funny thing happened on the way to that Democratic dream of dominating the future with a multiethnic coalition fighting a lily-white GOP.
Strange things started happening, like evangelical and Pentecostal Latinos providing the crucial Florida votes that put Donald Trump in the White House. Here’s French:
Optimistic Democrats didn’t see Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 so much as a refutation of the coalition of the ascendant theory as a quirk of the electoral college and a reminder that Hillary Clinton wasn’t Barack Obama. The nation wasn’t quite majority-minority yet, and thus that the white majority could still win races when identity politics reign supreme.
But 2020 told a different tale. The Democrats got whiter, the Republicans got more diverse, and now all the assumptions are scrambled. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a far wider margin than he did in 2016, but he did materially better with Hispanic, Asian, and black voters. In fact, Trump did better than Romney with nonwhite voters in 2016 (an improvement then mainly attributed to Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses), and he improved on that showing in 2020. What was once seen as an aberration now looks like a trend.
The trend continues. Last week Axios’s Josh Kraushaar described an ongoing “seismic shift” in the two parties’ coalitions. As outlined in a New York Times/Siena College poll, “Democrats now have a bigger advantage with white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters.” The Democratic Party’s losses with Hispanics are remarkable. Whereas Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and Biden won 65 percent in 2020, now the Hispanic vote is “statistically tied.”
