The surprising religious communities where Kamala Harris is getting support
When Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in 2020, only about 200 or 300 voters regularly joined calls hosted by the Latter-day Saints for Biden group.
Now, the Mormon community is showing up even stronger for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. About 1,600 people attended the August 2024 call for Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz, according to Rob Taber, the group’s national director.
“In terms of the electoral impact, it's not necessarily about winning the majority of the LDS vote, but the Republican weight of the vote has been so huge that any kind of fall off there absolutely does make a difference,” Taber told Raw Story.
Mormons aren’t the only surprising religious community that the Harris-Walz campaign is targeting to obtain votes.
“We know that there's roughly 15 percent of white evangelicals and maybe 20 percent of white Catholics who have reflexively voted Republican in the background — their religious identity and political identity came as a package deal — and they've wanted to change their political behavior without changing a religious identity,” Doug Pagitt, a pastor and executive director of Vote Common Good, a nonprofit group mobilizing Evangelical and Catholic voters, told Raw Story.
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With Trump capturing 80 percent of the white Evangelical Christian vote in 2016 and 2020, according to PBS News, groups like Evangelicals for Harris know it's not feasible to flip a majority of voters. But exit poll data shows that the number of Evangelicals who flipped for Biden in 2020 in Michigan and Georgia made enough of a difference for him to win both states, Jim Ball, a reverend and leader of Evangelicals for Harris, told Raw Story.
Conservative white religious women are increasingly supporting Harris, too, according to reporting from Religious News Service.
“We're not trying to get all Evangelicals. We're not trying to get most Evangelicals. We're just trying to get some Evangelicals, and we're just trying to get some in target states, primarily,” Ball said. “We think when we're talking about small margins, that we can actually make a serious impact and help elect Vice President Harris as the next president of the United States.”
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.
Religious voters who might flip
Ball said more than 300,000 voters are connected with Evangelicals for Harris. Trump’s “erratic behavior and threats” are “very dangerous,” he said, citing particular concerns about Trump’s recent comments about former Rep. Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face" in a war zone.
“We take this type of talk very seriously, and we're very concerned, so we're very much hoping and praying that Vice President Harris wins and can turn the page on Mr. Trump and this whole Trump era, and start to heal the divisions in our country and move us forward in positive, constructive ways,” Ball said.
Evangelical and Catholic voters in the 40- to 65-year-old range who “hold their faith pretty seriously and have reached middle adulthood and recognize that things are a bit more complicated than they may have thought when they were younger” are most likely to flip for Harris, Pagitt said.
These voters have increasingly felt “dislodged” from the Republican Party under Trump’s leadership, Pagitt said. Vote for Common Good released an ad last week voiced by actress Julia Roberts reminding women that their choice at the ballot box is theirs alone, not their husband’s.
“It's interesting to me, frankly, that the people saying they want those women to vote for a man who doesn't tell his own wife that he had an affair with Stormy Daniels, so, I find that a little shocking. To hear a person on Fox News who ended his own marriage in an affair with his intern that he's now married to say that if she voted for Kamala Harris, he would consider that an affair and a violation of her marriage, it gets a little hard to hear these people extolling religious virtue while not living up to it at all,” Pagitt said, referring Trump and Fox News host Jesse Watters.
Trump himself and the “lack of values that he represents” is the main reason some Mormon voters are flipping to vote for Harris, Taber said. Women and young adult members of the Church of Latter-day Saints members are more likely to vote for Democrats on Tuesday, he said.
“It was just kind of assumed that if you're a Latter-day Saint, you're going to be a Republican, that you're going to be patriotic. You're going to have this particular story of America as a land of religious freedom, and the Republican Party is the best one for protecting this religious freedom,” Taber said, noting that the peak of this feeling happened in 2012 when Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) won the Republican nomination for president.
“Going from him to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, just in terms of style and character, that can cause whiplash,” said Taber, noting Romney’s “classic” involvement in the Church of Latter-day Saints.
Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban” and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection were both turning points for some Mormon voters, Taber said. Until 2008, Latter-day Saint women were more likely than Latter-day Saint men to vote Republican, but that changed over the Trump years, Taber said.
One of Taber’s aunts, formerly a member of the Tea Party, voted for Biden in 2020 and Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox. This time, she’s voting for Harris and other Democratic candidates, Taber said.
“She was a steadfast Republican not that many years ago, and so it's been really, really notable, seeing the shift among LDS women from being the more Republican to being the more open to supporting Democratic candidates,” Taber said.
Taber said he was encouraged by the Harris campaign’s support of the Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz group, which included working with the Republicans for Harris coalition lead, the campaign’s national faith engagement leader and hearing from Harris’ senior adviser, Megan Jones, an alumna of Brigham Young University, a private university sponsored by the Latter-day Saints.
The issue of abortion
Abortion remains a sticking point for many religious voters, Ball said. The Evangelicals for Harris group has reframed the issue since Trump has said “let's leave it up to the states,” backing off of the typical Republican pro-life platform, he said.
“We're trying to give folks positive reasons to vote for Harris, and the way that we're doing that is to say, well, there's no anti-abortion candidate in the race. Who is the most pro-family candidate in the race?” Ball said.
That includes pointing to Harris’ support of access to healthcare for families, and Trump’s efforts to “destroy the Affordable Care Act,” Ball said. The gun safety law passed in 2022 is another pro-family argument for Harris, Ball said, noting that guns are the number one killer of children.
"One of the most pro-family things you can do is help to provide health care to families," Ball said.
Mandy Pallock, a 41-year-old Christian author and podcaster from San Antonio, Texas, said she grew up in a “super conservative family” and was taught that her “character” should be reflected at the polls.
“I was that lifelong Republican who really had never needed to look anywhere else, but then I really, sadly, waved goodbye to the party in 2016,” Pallock told Raw Story. “I often don't feel like I left the Republican Party. I feel like the Republican Party left me as they started to have conversations that I thought, ‘these don't represent me, and they don't represent what I'm looking for.’”
That caused her to vote for third party presidential candidates in 2016 and 2024 and to vote for a write-in for 2020. This year, she voted for a third party candidate instead of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and generally, the rest of her ballot is a “patchwork of Republican, Democrat and independent and libertarian” candidates, she said.
Pallock said she liked former South Carolina Gov. and U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley during the Republican primaries. Abortion was the main reason why she chose to ultimately vote for libertarian Chase Oliver.
“I found it hard to vote for Donald Trump because I didn't see him respecting the life of the marginalized or the immigrant or the other 50 percent. Character counts,” Pollock said. “I found it hard to vote for Kamala Harris because I do not see her respecting the life of the unborn, and that's important to me too. So, I did choose to cast my vote for a Libertarian candidate, which in effect is a vote for another option in the future.”
Pagitt said Vote for Common Good is campaigning for Harris down to the wire in this “all-hands-on-deck and all of the above moment.”
“Look, we're not out here trying to get Christians elected for office or that kind of stuff. We're telling Christians that they have an obligation to the common good and that their old Republican identity doesn't hold the demand on them if they don't want it to,” Pagitt said.
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