For Success at the Polls, Dems Look to the Pews

THEY HAVE THE FAITH. Now they just need the majority.

As Democrats scope out the emerging midterm landscape, party strategists and officials have grown excited about the number of candidates for whom religion is a major part of their biography and identity.

The most prominent so far is James Talarico, the middle school teacher turned Texas state representative running for U.S. Senate. The grandson of a Baptist preacher, Talarico is an outspoken Christian and an aspiring Presbyterian minister.

But Talarico is far from the only Democratic candidate notable for the role of faith in his life. There is also Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, who has a shot at flipping Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District. Meanwhile, in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, Lindsay James, an ordained Presbyterian pastor, and Clint Twedt-Ball, a United Methodist pastor, are both vying for the party’s nomination. Matt Schultz, the head pastor of Anchorage’s First Presbyterian Church, is running for Alaska’s sole congressional seat. Chaz Molder, a small-town mayor and Sunday school teacher, is running in Tennessee’s fifth district. The list goes on.

Democratic leaders and strategists are eager to see whether the party can regain ground among faith-based voters by running candidates of the cloth. But the candidates themselves, several of whom I spoke with in recent days, also see their entry into elected politics as symbolic of a larger development: the public recoiling at the immorality and cruelty of the Trump administration.

“People of faith are more and more stepping forward to run for office because part of the job of being a pastor is, to use the metaphor, ‘to be a shepherd,’” Schultz told me in a phone call from his home in Anchorage last month. “All of these people are coming to me and saying, ‘Please, won’t you help me? Please, won’t somebody do something to stop this onslaught of cruelty? We’re crying out in pain.’ And as a pastor, it’s my duty to stand between the abusers and the abused.”

The other candidates I spoke with had similar reflections. They didn’t see themselves as inherently political. But they felt morally and spiritually called to run for office. Much of their motivation arose from Trump’s treatment of immigrants and his slashing of the social safety net. But their aperture extended further back than the current administration. They felt that for too long the Republican party had distorted Christian values and the Democrats had allowed their opponents to monopolize faith.

“As a white Christian voter, you know, I think perhaps we’ve let the Republicans take some ownership in that space of faith-based leadership,” Molder told me.

Their task won’t be easy, even in a midterm climate that is looking better and better for Democrats. The so-called “God Gap”—a term used by political scientists to refer to the religiosity divide between the two parties—is real, as reflected in polling data and election results going back decades. Democratic leaders of course know this well, as witness the fact that officials were pitching me to report and write this very piece (along with several other outlets). They also know that demographic trends make it critical to build inroads here.

WHILE DEMOCRATS HAVE LONG had support from the black church—and while there has been a long history of black clergy serving in office, including current Sen. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, famously the home church for Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr.—there’s a growing belief within the party that rebuilding sustainable majorities will require gaining credibility among white Christian voters. Some party strategists are pointing directly to the declining importance of religion within the Democratic party ecosystem as an explanation for how the party became so out of touch with working-class Americans.

“There can be a profound, profound disconnect that is harmful and prevents candidates and prevents staff from seeing the country as it is,” said Michael Wear, the former director of Barack Obama’s 2012 faith-outreach effort, when I asked him about what the party risks by not engaging with Christian communities more directly.

“The Democratic party contains some of the most religious people in America and some of the least religious people in America. It’s not just [that] there’s a God gap between Democrats and Republicans. There’s a God gap within the Democratic party itself,” Wear added. “One of the ways to navigate that is to just take it off the table. But the problem when you take it off the table is you leave a pretty profound lane for someone like Donald Trump to say, ‘Well, they don’t care about you. They don’t hear you, but I do.’ And that’s a lot of what has happened over the last twelve years.”

Although the country has become less religious in recent decades, with the fastest-growing category in this century being the religiously unaffiliated “nones,” nearly 70 percent of Americans continue to identify as religious and 62 percent identify as Christian, according to Pew Research Center. But the shift in religiosity has not been reflected evenly between the parties: Since 2008, the percentage of Christians in the Democratic coalition has dropped by an astounding 20 points while it’s slipped by only 5 points for Republicans. The nones, who now make up some