A reporter asked: With the rising tide of nones, why aren't Democrats winning everything?

Sometimes you get a question from a reporter that stops you dead in your tracks. That happened to me recently.

The question was a seemingly simple one, but I had never considered before: If the nones are rising so quickly, then why aren’t Democrats just mopping the floor with Republicans?

Well, that’s a good question. And it’s not super easy to answer. But let me walk through how I am thinking about it.

The underlying assumption is two things:

(1) The nones are an increasingly larger share of the American electorate.

(2) They prefer Democrats on election day.

Let’s quickly justify both of those assumptions with data.

The nones are clearly rising. They were in the doldrums from 1972 through 1990. The share of Americans with no religious affiliation only increased from 5% to 7% during that stretch. But from that point forward, they just exploded in size. By 1996 they were in the double digits. By 2006, they were above 15%. Eight years later they were north of 20%. In 2021, the nones had reached an all-time high in the General Social Survey at ~29%.

In 1972, one in twenty adults were nones. In 2021, it’s almost one in three. That has to have major implications for politics, right? Well only if those non-religious folks tend to vote in large numbers for one party. Is that true?

Yes. Clearly it is. In the 2020 election, 86% of atheists voted for Joe Biden — just 10% were Trump voters. Eighty percent of agnostics also went from the Democrat, just 17% voted for the Republican. Those are solid blue blocs, without a doubt.

Nothing in particulars do tend to lean toward the Democrats, but not as much as the other types of nones. In 2020, 63% of nothing in particulars went for Biden, while 34% backed Trump. In 2016, just 55% of nothing in particulars voted for Hillary Clinton. This is a blue-ish bloc, but not nearly as homogeneous as atheists/agnostics.

The second assumption is generally true, though. The nones are an important constituency for any Democrat who aspires to win an election. But just how important?

Election Day 2018 culminates the universally proclaimed “year of the woman” in American politics. The media will be totaling up victors among the unprecedented number of female candidates and checking whether exit polls show a Donald Trump-era widening of the “gender gap” between the customary majorities of women for Democrats and men for Republicans.

Except for pondering evangelicals’ GOP fealty, the media often ignore religious factors that sometimes rival or exceed the impact of that male-female divide.

This time around, will the usual religious alignments persist? Intensify? Reporters should include this in the agenda for post-election analyses.

The related “God gap” came to the fore in 2004 when Democrat John Kerry scored 62 percent with voters who said they never attended religious services vs. churchgoers’ lopsided support for Republican George W. Bush. (Through much of U.S. history there was little difference in basic religiosity between the two major parties, while Protestants leaned Republican and Catholics Democratic.) State-by-state exit polls are unlikely to ask about that and data won’t come till later.

Since 2004, religiously unaffiliated “nones” have increased substantially in polling numbers. Pew Research says they made up fully 28 percent of Democratic voters in the 2014 midterms, outpacing all religious blocs in the party's coalition. Democratic nones neatly balance out evangelicals’ perennial Republican enthusiasm, but pundits say it’s tough for Democrats to organize them on campaign support and turnout.

Now, something new may be occurring.