HOW BIDEN SWUNG THE RELIGIOUS VOTE - POLITICO - 11.11/2020

 HOW BIDEN SWUNG THE RELIGIOUS VOTE - POLITICO- 11/11/2020

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPOT.COM - 11/11/2020

EXCERPTS:

Trump's team thought religious-minded voters would save him in key states. They now appear to have turned away just enough for him to lose.

 

    It wasn't until Election Day, when returns showed counties across Michigan, Georgia and the industrial Midwest leaning toward Joe Biden due to a groundswell of religious support, that the Trump campaign realized it had a problem.

 

    For months, President Donald Trump 's top aides and religious allies dismissed his softening support with white evangelicals and Catholic voters as a polling fluke - another media-spun narrative intended to frighten the incumbent Republican and his top donors. No president had ever done more for these demographics, they claimed, pointing to the unfettered access many conservative Christian groups had to the Trump administration and the influence they wielded over policy priorities and judicial nominees....

 

    Between 47 percent and 50% of Catholic voters supported Trump - small decline from 2016, but enough to cost him the Rust Belt states that mattered most to his path to victory. Nationally, the president carried white Catholics by a 15-point margin, according to AP/VoteCast data, marking a significant decline from his 33-point margin of victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago.

 

    Trump's slippage with white evangelicals was less pronounced - surveys showed him carrying 76 percent to 78 percent of the white, born-again Christian vote - slight decrease from 2016, when he won support from about 8 in 10 white evangelicals. But it had far-reaching implications for the president in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and George, where the current vote totals show him losing by less than 1 percent....

 

    When we look back on this moment from the lens of, 'Here's what the Republican nominee needs to do to win in 2024,' I hope there will be people saying we shouldn't take Christian conservative for granted," said one adviser to the Trump campaign, who added that future GOP presidential hopeful "should never again assume white evangelicals can't be persuaded by the right candidate with a D next to his or her name."

 

    There is perhaps no better illustration of how the Trump campaign failed to neutralize the threat of Biden's outreach to Christian voter than in Kent County, Mich. An evangelical in the Midwestern battleground state, the county gave Biden 50,000 vote this cycle than Clinton drew four years earlier, ultimately flipping it from red to blue.

 

    In the Midwestern we saw gains that in a number of ways outpaced our margin of victory," said Josh Dickson, national faith engagement director for the Biden campaign. "The reason we won is these key states is because of the coalition we built. I think the work we did to engage evangelicals and Catholics undoubtedly helped us there....

George H. Kubeck,

Congratulations! President Biden: "As a Catholic-in-name-only politician, you've duped American Catholic voters three times; twice with Obama and once for yourself."