Doug Pagitt writes:

Central to our work at Vote Common Good, I spend a lot of my time traveling the country speaking to voters, particularly evangelical and Catholic voters who are hardwired into voting Republican, working to get them to break out of those patterns. What I’ve learned is that most don’t want or need their elected leader to be like them, but they really do want their leader to like them. It wasn’t clear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton liked evangelical and Catholic men when she ran for president in 2016, and it remains largely unclear to many of these voters in 2024 if Kamala Harris does. Trump, on the other hand, probably doesn’t like them, but he put his arms around these voters in a transactional exchange, and he promised and in some cases delivered them power.

But on the trail in 2020, 2022 and this year, I’ve gleaned the reason many evangelical and Christian voters ultimately leave Trump: his obvious lack of kindness. A poll that my organization Vote Common Good commissioned in 2020 showed that in swing states, Trump’s lack of kindness was driving evangelical and Catholic voters away in large enough numbers to potentially affect the outcome of the election.

Voters typically realize that the way they vote reflects on them. And those religious voters who defected from Trump didn’t like the way his unkindness reflected on them, whether it be putting migrant 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. Many of these voters know that’s not the behavior they want their children to emulate. [Continue reading…]