For the past four decades, the notion that religious beliefs should guide voters’ decision-making has been largely monopolized by the Republican Party. But the partisan “God gap” hasn’t gone unnoticed by some religious Democrats, who have urged candidate after candidate to make appeals to religious values and beliefs in the hope of turning the “religious left” into a politically relevant force. And as the 2020 Democratic primary ramps up, there’s already speculation that the right candidate could tap a long-dormant reserve of religious energy among Democratic voters.

...And to some extent, forging connections between faith and politics makes sense for Democratic candidates — a majority of Democratic primary voters are religious. But there are several big hurdles facing any Democrat looking to use the language of faith to marshal voters in the primary. For one thing, the Democratic coalition isn’t dominated by a single religious group. And Democrats don’t prioritize religion the way Republicans do — in fact, the Democratic Party has been growing steadily less religious over the past 20 years. Certain groups of religious voters — in particular, black Protestants — will likely play an important role in the primary, and there may be some room for candidates to appeal to religious moderates. But in a diverse and increasingly secular party, religious rhetoric alone may not get the candidates very far.



...And while talking about religion can be a good strategy for gaining media attention, there’s little evidence that it’s translating into actual gains among religious voters — at least, not yet. A Morning Consult tracking poll conducted May 20-26 among Democratic primary voters found that Joe Biden, a Catholic, has a commanding lead among all major religious groups, followed in all but one case by Bernie Sanders,2 who may be the only candidate in the race to say he doesn’t participate in organized religion.

...And even though a substantial number of Democrats are religious, they have come to make up a smaller and smaller subset of the party. Over the past two decades, the share of people in the Democratic coalition who don’t identify with any religion doubled, from 14 percent in 1998 to 28 percent in 2018, according to the General Social Survey. The result is that today’s Democratic Party is increasingly secular, which complicates and limits traditional forms of faith outreach. “This emerging group of secular Democrats coexists a little uneasily with the more religious wing of the party,” said David Campbell, a political science professor at Notre Dame and the coauthor of “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” “It’s a sizeable portion of the electorate to ignore, but I think the party has yet to figure out how to appeal to these people.”