Pastor predicts Kamala Harris can ‘break the backbone of the MAGA movement’

Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor based in Minneapolis, predicted in a Saturday op-ed for MSNBC that Vice President Kamala Harris has the potential to break former President Donald Trump’s hold on white evangelical voters and “break the backbone of the MAGA movement.”

Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, in his op-ed titled “How I’ve Been Convincing Christians They Don’t Have to Vote Republican,” argues that Harris could receive the highest level of evangelical support since former President Jimmy Carter won roughly half the evangelical vote in 1976.

“If we come together and don’t leave these people in the hands of Trump, I think it’s possible that Harris will receive the highest level of evangelical support since Jimmy Carter got roughly half the evangelical vote in 1976,” Pagitt wrote. “And if that happens, it would break the back of the MAGA movement.”

Newsweek Magazine reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns by email on Sunday for comment.

However, historical voting data suggests that such a drastic shift would be unprecedented in recent electoral history. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelical Christians have consistently supported Republican candidates by wide margins in recent presidential elections. In 2016, 80 percent of self-identified white, born-again or evangelical Christians voted for Trump, while only 16 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.

Pagitt’s organization, Vote Common Good, focuses on encouraging religious voters, particularly evangelicals and Catholics, to prioritize the common good over party affiliation when casting their ballots. The group’s efforts in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania aim to sway enough movable religious voters to tip the balance in Harris’ favor.

The pastor’s optimism is due in part to what he sees as growing disillusionment among some evangelical voters with Trump’s behavior and policies. A poll Vote Common Good commissioned in 2020 showed that in key states Trump’s unkindness was turning off evangelical and Catholic voters in large enough numbers to potentially affect the election’s outcome.

“Voters typically realize that the way they vote reflects on them,” Pagitt wrote in Saturday’s op-ed. “And religious voters who turned away from Trump didn’t like the way his unkindness reflected back at them — whether it was putting immigrant children in cages, the way he treats women, the way he treats the press, the way he treats nearly everyone who left his administration, and the way he treats democracy itself.”

While some shifts at the margins are possible, historical data suggest that dramatic changes in religious voting blocs are rare. Pew Research Center’s analysis of 2016 exit polls showed little change in the political alignments of American religious groups compared with previous elections.

Groups that traditionally backed Republican candidates, such as white born-again or evangelical Christians and white Catholics, strongly supported Trump, while groups that typically favored Democrats, including religious “nones,” Hispanic Catholics and Jews, strongly backed Clinton.

Pagitt writes that even small shifts in evangelical support could prove decisive in closely contested states. He points to Kent County, Michigan, home to Grand Rapids and several Christian colleges, as an example of what’s possible. After an intense outreach campaign by Vote Common Good in 2020, the county went from supporting Trump by 3 points in 2016 to backing Biden by 6 points in 2020 — a 9-point shift.

Harris’s campaign appears to be taking note of this potential opportunity. The choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as the vice president’s running mate is seen by some as a nod to religious voters in the Midwest. However, Pagitt writes that more needs to be done to actively court the evangelical vote.

“Democrats in general need to embrace the idea that evangelicals, and especially white evangelical men, are worth winning over, and that evangelicals can be won over without the party compromising its values,” he said.

Pagitt and his organization are planning a broad grassroots campaign to reach out to these voters in key swing states. Their strategy includes voter rallies, roundtables, billboard campaigns and training Democratic candidates on how to engage with religious voters.

“We need to tell them that what Democrats are pushing is in line with the values ​​that evangelicals hold dear: improving the world and bringing people together,” Pagitt wrote. “Many Christians are heartbroken at the idea of ​​having to choose between a faith that is meaningful to them and a political identity that has become wedded to it. They don’t know what to do, and we need to help them separate those two identities.”