Democrats find God

To explain, I'm Sean Ramosfer, my living Washington DC, along with my colleague, Christian Paz from Vox, but he went to Kansas, Christian, why Kansas? - I was on a mission, like a Mormon mission. - Let's go with Christian mission. I was on a faith journey, actually. - Okay, okay. - I was hunting down a guy named Adam Hamilton. He's a mega-church pastor, he's a Methodist. He started the state's largest church in the Kansas City suburbs, and he's running for Senate now as a Democrat. - President Trump won Kansas by more than 16 points in 2024, but in these midterms, the sunflower state has become an unlikely battleground for a Senate seat. - In Comet Republican Senator Roger Marshall, it's running neck and neck with Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. - It is now quite possible that the Democrats have a better chance of winning in Kansas than they do in Maine. - It functions as a task case. Can Democrats win back religious voters? And if so, how do they do it? - On today, explain from Vox. Support for the program today comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the United States and Canada with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com/save right now for your free quote. That is fetchpet.com/save. - Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where auto comes in. And all in one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com/vox. That's oduo.com/vox. - There is no place like this. - Today explained. - There's no place like this. - Today explained. - Okay, our colleague, Christian Paz, went to Kansas and of course he spoke to some voters. - Yeah, so I spent a few days following Hamilton around talking to people who came to his campaign events. - Do you consider yourselves Democrats or independents or actually for registered Republicans? - All of his voting blue. - No way. - I was in places like Salina in the middle of the state. - Do you live in Slino or do you live here in Salina? - Yes, yes, I do. - We drove down to other towns in central Kansas. We drove out to Maga Red Western parts of the states too. They all bow to one person and that's Trump and they've forgotten us. - All the places that we went to, I felt like one thing that united all of it was, how easily they felt like they turned into worship spaces. Like he would go to the front of the room, be at the center of the space. Obviously he could work the room. - I served the Congress just to share that. And I wasn't asking that, but I, you know, better than I ever was probably. - What's your superpower? - Jesus said this. - So that was him talking to a crowd in Lensburg, Kansas, population of about 3,800, pretty small. And I was surprised with a range of ages in that room. It was old folks, you know, the kinds of people that you might see at a No Kings rally, for example. Mixed in with college students. And yet everyone, I don't know, it looked like they were being, he was preaching to them at his church. - You have to let people see your critiques, your kindness, and your compassion. - He can refer to church history and debates when he talks about why his views have evolved on things like gay and lesbian people, on abortion rights, on how to take care of the environment. And like in Lensburg, he literally broke into song. - It's not terrible, sir, so forgive me. If you know a single of all creatures of a common king who lived on pure voice and lived on singing. - He's not that bad. - And I had to stop myself for a minute there because this obviously reminds me of my own like faith upbrinking of Catholic. And I think it's that kind of the rowback, that kind of reminding people of the way that maybe they were raised religious if they're not practicing right now. - Okay. - Or if they are religious now, you know, it was a common bond and everyone in that room joined in. It was actually really shocking to me. - But okay, so he's got a decent singing voice and you know, the people joined in. But you mentioned gay and lesbian rights and abortion. This is a Democrat. Like these are issues that matter to conservative Christians. How is he fairing with them and what are his positions? - It really helps that he's a genuine moderate and even methodism itself, the tradition that just comes from, is all about trying to find the middle path between various faith traditions. - So I wrote a book a number of years ago called "Seeing Grey in a World of Black and White." And not everything is great. There are things that are clearly black and white, but there's a lot of things where there's room for us to see. I may not ever get to where you are, but I can see where you're coming from and I can respect you for that. - He calls himself a radical centrist and abortion is actually a really good way into that because he was asked about this at that chapel, at that event in Blingsborg. He was asked how he would wrestle with this and he said he supports legal access to abortion though he says he's pro-life with a quote heavy heart. - Uh-huh. - It's interesting. He said he knows that Kansons have already voted to protect reproductive rights in the state multiple times, but he also shares a story of his mother. She got pregnant at 17 in the mid '60s. Her dad was a TWA airline pilot. And he offered to fly her to Switzerland to have an abortion. She wouldn't do it. And she had the baby, baby Adam Hamilton. - You know, the far left, they don't want me telling the story about my mom. Please don't tell that story. On the far right, you are still supporting the right for women to choose. I could never vote for you. But I think in the broad center, the folks who are on the left say, you know what, that's real. Your story's real and it's spoke to me even though I, and I know that you're gonna solve these, make sure that there's abortion rights. And on the right people say, I appreciate the fact that you understand a little tension. I feel like you hear me and you understand me and you understand what motivates me. And I can vote for you even if you're not exactly the candidate I want you to be. - Okay, so there's a lot of nuance here. Hamilton, you know, he's a Democrat, but he doesn't really like abortion, but he respects your decision to have one and is grateful that his mom didn't. Is his complicated religiosity enough to win in Kansas, which is as you said, this deeply, deeply read state that hasn't elected a Democrat to this position in decades? - No, I think that's a fundamental question in all of this. He needs to win a lot of Republicans and Independents in order to have a chance at winning this election. He's made that a really big part of, basically every part of his campaign. He says it in ads, he says it at the debates, he says it in speeches and interviews. Even if you're a former Trump voter, you have a place in this campaign. - Everywhere I go, 30% of the people come to my notes are Republicans, and most often they're saying, "I've never voted for a Democrat, but I voted for you." - I've been a Republican since I could register to vote and I served as governor of Kansas. I'm proud to co-chair Republicans for Hamilton. - I was in Hutchinson actually at one of these Republicans for Hamilton events, and I met a bunch of these folks there. - Hi, I'm one of the reporters that's covering the campaign. - Yes. - I'd love to hear what we were just chatting about with. - Well, when I was telling Adam, is I've been a Republican my whole life, and we have one of the signs in our front yard that I heard him say tonight, and I've heard him say during the campaign, things that I've been feeling, things that I've been saying that things are not right. - So that was David Rankin. I met him in Elseworth, Kansas. It's a town of just over 3,000 people, and we were talking at a senior center. He told me that he and his wife have felt that in the Trump years it's been hard to preserve a sense of community in that small town. - We know who's Democrat, we know who's Republican. - That friendships have been tested, and you can only really keep relationships alive if you don't talk about politics at all. - I think for the most part, no one's talking to each other about it. - People in that town have also backed on all Trump in each of those last three contests by gigantic margins, like 50 plus points. But things are different now. Trump is quite impopular here. The tariffs, the Ron War, that's all hit the farming and rural communities, especially hard over the last two years. And on top of that, the incumbent Republican Senate candidate Roger Marshall, has been dealing with a lot of scandals. So when the rankings heard that Adam Hamilton was considering running for office earlier this year, their ears perked up. David and his wife, Dina, are active in the Presbyterian church locally, and they have friends that used to go to Hamilton's church. - In our church, we've used several of his series, and I believe in him as a person. I believe in him as a pastor, but I also now believe in him as our future senator. Did you run into any, you know, Kansas moderates, Kansas Republicans who, I don't know, liked the peel of this Adam Hamilton, but said, you know what, I can't budge on ex-issue and this guy will never get my vote. Yeah, I think one thing that especially folks who are tuning into this race now need to remember, again, is he's still a Democrat. It's an uphill battle for him. There are still a lot of very conservative Republican and just conservative voters in general might not be religious, who that's just not going to work for them. He can do things like say that he's not a socialist or that they're only two genders, or that one other thing that he said, for example, was that we need strong border security. But then you run into voters like some folks in elsewhere too, an older lady who asked him a question about immigration policy. Are you for illegal in this country? I am not for illegal in this country. In terms of policy, I believe we need to have strong borders, we need to have strong policies. But I also think I'm for treating people humanely. You don't hear about them raping, murdering people? I absolutely do not want people doing horrible things. So there are people who should arrest them and throw them out of the country, or they should be imprisoned. So I totally agree that people who commit crimes should not be free on the streets. They should be at the washroom of force. They should be. Yes, they did. That's not the same as raping and murdering somebody though. So let's make a difference between somebody who came here and— That's a damn right thing. Yeah, yeah. It is. She says, "That's a Democrat." Is in like, you just confirmed all my biases about Democrats or all my beliefs about Democrats? Right. There's just some issues that you're not going to convince me on, and this is where I'm going to draw the line on. He acknowledges this, right? It doesn't matter how much he talks about immigration, reform and border security, how much he talks about the complicated politics of abortion. For some people, there are just issues that he's not going to be able to win them over in. Probably not going to win over this South lady no matter how much he talks about Jesus. So tell me, Christian, zooming out of the great state of Kansas and looking at the country more broadly, does what you saw in Kansas tell us anything about where Democrats stand with religious voters across the country and whether they can win them back or was it all kind of an Adam Hamilton, Kansas thing? Hamilton is a bit of a unicorn. I kept thinking about this like the perfect combination of symptoms of ingredients of whatever term you want to say, Trump disapprovaled down, Marshall not being very good, the issues all working in Hamilton's favor, Hamilton having all these skills and just history in the community across the state because of his church. That's going to be really hard to replicate. But the thing that is important for Democrats to see here, getting back to this question of when they win religious voters over is they kind of don't have a choice because if you're just looking at the raw numbers, one of the biggest stories in religion and American politics over the last 50 to 60 years has been that if you're religious, you're probably a Republican. We're still a very religious country and those religious voters are especially concentrated in the states that Democrats need to get competitive in if they want to have a chance at winning back the Senate, having a chance at winning the Electoral College in a future presidential election. So it's not something that can work everywhere, but it is something that can work in enough states going forward. And it's also something that Democrats don't really have a choice in ignoring. You can read Christian Paws at vox.com and you can hear how Democrats lost religious voters in the first place in a minute when we're back on today's explained. So for the show today comes from Bill, like man, that football player is Billed except they got rid of the U. Housing payments are probably a huge chunk of your income. So wouldn't it be nice if you could actually get some rewards back on those payments with bill points you can. You can use bill points towards flights, hotel, lifurites, amazon.com, purchases, future housing payments and more and every bill to member gets access to a neighborhood concierge. Built right into the built app. Think of it as your own personal assistant connecting you to your home and more than 50,000 merchant partners. You can download the built app and join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com/explain. That's j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t.com/explain. Use our links so they know we sent you that link one more time. Joinbilt.com/explain. 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Prescription products required online consultation with a licensed healthcare provider who will determine if prescription is appropriate, restrictions apply, individual results may vary. See hymns.com for full details. Support for the show comes from found running a business is a lot like being a duck. Wow, I didn't know that. You have to move along the surface smoothly, almost effortlessly, to the outside observer, but under the water you're working hard paddling away, dealing with headache after headache. That's especially true when it comes to managing your finances, luckily they're found. Also someone's trying to eat you all the time, maybe not so, I added that bit. Found provides business banking with built-in software to handle your bookkeeping, invoicing contractor payments and more. That means no switching between multiple systems for banking and nobody wants to do that, or bookkeeping, or invoices, and contractor payments. Not to mention hunting down W9s from your contractors at the end of the year to file 1099s. Well, let's skip all that, you can open a found account at found.com, that's f-o-u-n-d.com. In case you forgot how to spell found, found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank, they're a bank, member FDIC, found does not provide legal or tax advice. My name is Dr. Ryan Burge, I'm a professor of practice, the John C. Dan Forcent on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Let's take a step back for a moment, because what we're talking about here is whether Democrats, religious Democrats can win religious voters. But when exactly did it become like a foregone conclusion that they couldn't? When did Democrats lose religious people? I certainly can't believe this has always been the case. Now it's really, we called the Godgap and it really started emerging in the early 1990s. Now it was a lot smaller in those days than it is today, now it's humongous. But that's when we really saw the non-religious share of Americans rise exponentially. So between 1972 and 1991, the share of Americans were non-religious, it was basically the same around 5-6% of America, but then after that the line just started going up into the right. And where it really started rising was among liberals, Democrats and liberals. People who started leaving religion primarily Christianity during that period of time. And that's when I think we saw that sort of like cycle of, I can't be a Democrat and be a Christian, sort of really lock in as an idea that people began to embrace. And then over time really what's happened is the Republican Party has leaned more into its Christian identity, its sort of values voters, family values, cultural Christianity kind of argument. And the Democrats have sort of walked away from that. They've talked more about pluralism. I did a data analysis of the tweets of the 2020 presidential candidates on the Democratic side. So you know you had Buttigieg and Klobuchar and Jill Bran and Biden and Bernie. And I was looking for religious language in their tweets to kind of like see how they discuss religious ideas. They actually discussed Islam seven times more than they discussed Christian identity in those tweets. As someone who is Jewish, it gives me a special pleasure to be able to work with the Muslim community. Together, we're going to build a nation based on love and justice, not hatred and ashtag "Iftars" with Bernie. Bernie Sanders. Even brought up to everyone celebrating Hashtag "Eed Al Adha" across the country and around the world. Kamala Harris. A thief from the Prophet Muhammad instructs, "Whoever among you sees the wrong, let him change it with his hand." But so I think in some ways like the Democratic Party basically said, "Yeah, we're not going to talk about Christianity because that's like the the hegemonic power in America." And that's the Republicans, you know, field to play in and we're going to talk about. And what's funny is, for everyone, Muslim in America, there's 63 Christians. So I just think it's an interesting messaging strategy. The Democrats have sort of like forgotten that most Americans are Christians and you need a ton of Christian votes to win an election day. And they stop doing that and guess what? That's why you don't win in a state like Texas or Kansas. When you ignore the huge part of the electorate that's got a vote for you to win the office. I mean, strategically, how did they justify that? How did that make sense in some back room meeting that they could dismiss that much of the country? Democrats have always been obsessed with being like the big tent and being inclusive and always looking for like the, I don't want to say fringe, but like the smaller parts of their coalition and elevating. We see that with a trans debate too. Like let's be very close. Share Americans are transgender less than 1%, but it seems like it takes up a massive part of the conversation. And so I think the same thing happens with religion is they want to be this big tent party and by doing it, they want to always look at the fringes and the edges of their party and say and elevate them and say we see you. You matter. The problem with that though is it turns off a lot of Christians. It's like why aren't you talking at least a little bit about us? So it's that democratic consultant bubble. Like how many people in that bubble are actually like churchgoing Catholics or evangelicals or Episcopalians. The answer is not very many. You know the democratic coalition is a really weird mix by the way religiously speaking. It's like 45% non-religious voters. It's atheists, agnostics, nothing in particular. But then you've got black Protestants. You've got Hispanic Catholics. You've got Jews. You've got Muslims. Like that's a hard thing to message for because if like you say like yeah I think churches should be able to fire someone for being gay. The atheists are going to like run you out of the building. But the black Protestants and the catheter go of course we should have the right to fire someone for being gay if they're our pastor or they're one of our Sunday school teachers. So I think that's why Democrats have sort of avoided it largely is because they can't no matter what they say. They can't please all these disparate coalitions. Meanwhile the Republicans all have to say is Christianity is good. White people are great. White Christianity is great and you've won like 75% of their voters are under that umbrella. So I think a lot of it's just strategic. The Democrats have a really hard time holding together this sort of disparate coalition of people. If you're a Democrat running for office and you are a religious person, you have to make that part of your identity from the beginning of your campaign. You can't like cosplay as religious if a consultant tells you that religion matters. I think you have to make it a central part of your identity as a candidate from literally the first day you announce as opposed to like putting it on later. Republicans have the luxury of not having to do that because you just assume they're Christians. You assume they're values voters. You assume they're culturally conservative for whatever reason. And it's you know it's so funny and I don't want to make this about the President of the United States because I'm having such a nice time not talking to you about him right now. But like here's a guy who is the antithesis of Christian values. The Bible means a lot to me but I don't want to get into specifics. Even decide a verse. I don't want to do that. And yet he's had this chokehold on the party for a decade and so many evangelical Christians and Christians of many other denominations don't seem to care. And here we are talking about how Democrats got to walk the walk and not just talk to talk. So how do Democrats make inroads with Christian voters when maybe they want a supporter right to choose? And they believe that gay people should be able to get married and have equal rights to straight people and all the rest. I think this is the difficult line that the Democrats have to walk. And this is how the Republicans can sort of say that you're Christianity's really political Christianity, right? It's like you take the parts of the Bible that you like and then ignore the parts you don't like. And I think Republicans do this by the way, just the opposite direction. You know like Republicans will elevate the abortion and gay marriage passes like they're the only thing that's in the Bible. Then forget about the parts about income inequality and immigration. Meanwhile Democrats will talk a lot about how the Bible talks about wealth and inequality and immigration. And then they go, oh, and the abortion stuff, oh, that was written at a different time or the gay marriage. That was written at a different time or the women's stuff. So what we do is basically we use the Bible as a weapon to justify our own political beliefs. And the left and the right does that kind of equally I think in some ways. The problem is the left is really bad at criticizing the right for that and the right is really good at battering the left. When they see people say crazy stuff online like God has no gender or really, you know, the Bible doesn't talk about gay people when it does in some spots. You know what I mean? So I think it's an asymmetrical thing and the Democrats have always been bad. It's sort of batting back the criticism they receive. Well, the Republicans are really good at batting back the criticism they receive from the Democrats. Well, let's just say like a John Asuf who I believe is Jewish came to you and said, Ryan, you seem to know this stuff in and out. If I want to appeal to Christian voters in this country ahead of 2028 because I say I'm not running for president but of course I am. Of course he is. What would you say to Mr Asuf? I think you need to appeal to the shared morality we have around certain like hot button issues. And that is like on abortion, I don't think the response to the DOBS decision was, you know, they had this shout your abortion campaign among the Democrats. Where he was going online like be proud of having an abortion. That's not where the average Christian is on the issue of abortion. No, by the way, the average Christian is actually in favor of abortion in certain circumstances. They're actually not like hard line on the issue. They surely don't see it as a morally good thing though. They see this a very troubled, difficult, morally ambiguous thing. And don't portray it that way on the stump, right? Say, he listened. I think we can all admit that abortion is probably not what we, you know, like we shouldn't celebrate that. That's not something we should try to elevate, but we do need to allow people to have the courage of their own conscience to make the decisions they see what are best for them and a safe effective way. You know, like that kind of messaging says, I see you. I understand your morality on this issue, but I also understand that we are all kind of troubled about all these things. You know, we're not clear left or right, black or white on these issues. So I think there's ways to talk about these issues that don't turn off Christians, but like speak to the nuance of what these issues are. And the Democrats are so afraid of like making the 1% really angry, like on their side, that they won't say the thing that appeals to like the big part of the distribution on these issues. And that's really what frustrates me is Democrats ask too much of their candidates and Republicans don't ask enough. Ryan Burge used to be a pastor, now he's a professor. Miles Bryan is a producer. Avishai Artsi is too. Amin al-Sadi is an editor. Gabriel Donatov is a fact checker, David Tatashore. And Bridger Dunnigan, our audio engineers, and take explained is this. Support for the show comes from Canba Enterprise. Design is the face of your brand. 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