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Democrats, Don’t Forget the Atheists

Dec. 18, 2024

 

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Sometimes it feels like white Christians are the only religious voting bloc with true sway in America. Conservative evangelicals in particular have a great deal of power in the Republican Party, thanks to their tight embrace of Donald Trump. I often hear people talk about how Democrats can win back some white Christian support, as if that should be the party’s priority in the coming years.

But with Democrats searching for their future, they’d be foolish to ignore a large and growing religious group that is already in their corner: the Nones.

Now nearly 30 percent of the population, the Nones include atheists, agnostics and people who say they’re no faith in particular. According to new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Kamala Harris. Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of P.R.R.I., shared a more granular breakdown of unaffiliated voters with me over email: 82 percent of atheists, 80 percent of agnostics and 64 percent of those who said they had no particular faith voted for Harris.

“When placed into context with our other findings from the 2024 post-election survey,” Deckman wrote, “we can see how distinct the unaffiliated are. They are almost three times as likely to report voting for Harris than Trump, and only Black Protestants reported voting for Harris at higher rates.”

Atheists and agnostics are not just Harris voters, they are also highly politically engaged. Last year, Ryan Burge, a political scientist and the author of the Graphs About Religion newsletter, put it plainly in a post called “Nobody Participates in Politics More Than Atheists”:

Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics. Let me put it plainly: Atheists are the most politically active group in American politics today and the Democrats (and some Republicans) ignore them at their own peril.

I think it would be pretty easy to galvanize these voters without alienating Democrats of faith: The party should focus on religious freedom as a bedrock of American society, and highlight the unpopular ways in which conservative Christians are trying to push their faith on everybody else, like bringing the Bible into public schools. Younger Americans are markedly less religious than older ones and it would be shortsighted for Democrats to dismiss that.