Religiously Unaffiliated Voters Will Likely Break Strongly For Biden
This year, there’s been a lot of focus from the two campaigns on religious voters, and relatively little emphasis on people who aren’t religious. But that doesn’t mean religiously unaffiliated voters can’t — or won’t — make a big difference this election cycle. When I last checked in on religious subgroups, people with no religious affiliation were strongly in Biden’s camp.
Overall, according to a Pew survey from late September and early October, 71 percent of religiously unaffiliated people were supporting Biden, and only 22 percent were supporting Trump. The skew toward Biden was less pronounced among people who identify as “nothing in particular” (62 percent for Biden, 31 percent for Trump), but self-identified agnostics (79 percent for Biden, 15 percent for Trump) and atheists (88 percent for Biden, 7 percent for Trump) were overwhelmingly leaning toward Biden.
Those strong levels of support are despite very little outreach to religiously unaffiliated voters from the Biden campaign. As Daniel Cox and I wrote a few months ago, that’s in part because religiously unaffiliated people are hard to organize politically — and it can still be tricky for candidates to openly appeal to the unaffiliated without alienating religious voters in the process. But this is a large and growing group — and it’s likely to be a huge chunk of this year’s Democratic coalition. So it’s a demographic worth watching, because Democratic candidates may start more explicitly reaching out to religiously unaffiliated voters in the future.