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Monday, March 31, 2025

Barack Obama

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Could Hispanic-Americans, Protestants especially, shape the '22 and '24 elections?

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Could Hispanic-Americans, Protestants especially, shape the '22 and '24 elections?

Something is afoot when two New York Times columnists, Charles Blow on the left and Ross Douthat on the right, both make the identical observation in Monday's edition.

Blow, who fears a "Biden blood bath" in the November midterms, underscored that Quinnipiac polling shows President Joe Biden's approval rating is even lower among Hispanics than whites, partly because "Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues." Douthat wrote that to win, Democrats need to do better with two groups from the Barack Obama coalition that have drifted rightward since, "culturally conservative Latinos and working class whites."

The 2020 election was a landmark for this community with an estimated 16.6 million voters, a record proportion of the electorate. There are a number of good analyses of the 2020 Hispanic vote online to consider. A Bloomberg piece reminds us "the Latinos of the United States have no single identity, no shared world view."

This article notes that Donald Trump won 53.5% in majority Hispanic precincts in Miami-Dade County on the way to carrying all-important Florida with its 29 electoral votes. Understandable aversion to any hint of "socialism" by those from Cuba, as well as Nicaragua and Venezuela, no doubt helped. In Arizona's populous Maricopa County, Trump improved his showing over 2016 in 61% of Hispanic-majority precincts. Exit polling said Trump improved over 2016 in Nevada by 8%. Other reports cited similar shifts in southern border areas of Texas. In 2004, George W. Bush proved Republicans can obtain a handsome number of Hispanic-Americans.

GetReligion's own tmatt has more than once proposed that the news media have neglected the religion aspect of recent Republican inroads and, in particular the growth of Hispanic Protestant churches. This is a big religion beat story in its own right. Or it could provide a strategic political analysis leading up to November 8 focusing either on politics nationally or on a specific regional audience.

The essential starting point for background is religion data from Pew Research Center's major survey of 5,103 U.S. Hispanic adults, in a report compiled in 2014.


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Podcast: Strategic cardinal floats trial balloon, saying Catholic LGBTQ doctrines are wrong

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Podcast: Strategic cardinal floats trial balloon, saying Catholic LGBTQ doctrines are wrong

If you follow political news, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a “trial balloon.”

One online dictionary definition states: “A trial balloon is a proposal that you mention or an action that you try in order to find out other people's reactions to it, especially if you think they are likely to oppose it.”

Here’s a famous example. Let’s say that the Obama White House wants to shift its stance on gay marriage, once the president has reached a point — in 2012 — where he may or may not need strong support from social-conservative Black church leaders. Thus, it was a surprise, kind of, when Vice President Joe Biden, went on “Meet the Press” and said that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriages.

The White House needed to know (1) how other Democrats would respond, (2) how Black-church leaders would respond and (3) how potential conservative critics would respond, including Catholic leaders in America. Central to all of this, of course, is how this “trial balloon” is framed in the coverage by elite media. It took very little time for Barack Obama to get on board.

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), we looked at a complex drama unfolding in the European leadership of the Catholic church. The key player is Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, archbishop of Luxembourg, and a leader — the term is “relator general” — in the Pope Francis team leading the Synod on Synodality on the future of the Catholic faith. Depending on who one talks to, this synod is either a chance to listen to Catholics around the world or the front door to Vatican III.

But here is the key quote from Hollerich, drawn from an interview with the German Catholic news agency KNA.) This is part of a collection of blunt, verbatim statements from Hollerich collected at L’Espresso:

“The Church’s positions on homosexual relationships as sinful are wrong. I believe that the sociological and scientific foundation of this doctrine is no longer correct. It is time for a fundamental revision of Church teaching, and the way in which Pope Francis has spoken of homosexuality could lead to a change in doctrine.


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Mainstream press shrugs at Biden's Notre Dame snub for upcoming graduation rite

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Mainstream press shrugs at Biden's Notre Dame snub for upcoming graduation rite

This is the time of year where college graduations dominate the lives of many Americans. A year after these ceremonies were relegated to Zoom because of the pandemic, graduations are back this spring, with masks and social distancing in place, to again signal the sending off to undergraduates into the workplace.

For journalists, graduations have long served as an easy news stories. Above all, the graduation speaker is what makes these ceremonies news. At that vast majority of rites at elite and state schools the speaker is — to one degree or another — a cultural or political liberal.

Thus, is it any surprise that the ongoing tug-of-war between the U.S. bishops and President Joe Biden has spilled over into the graduation season? Well, it has in the form of the president not addressing graduates at the University of Notre Dame this year.

This news story was broken by Catholic News Agency. Here’s how the May 11 news story opened:

In a break with recent tradition, President Joe Biden will not be delivering the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame this year – although he was invited by the university to do so.

On Tuesday, the university announced that its May 23 commencement speaker will be Jimmy Dunne, a finance executive and trustee of the university. During the last three presidential administrations, U.S. presidents or vice presidents have addressed the university's commencement in their first year in office, but that trend will not continue in 2021.

Although a university spokesman told CNA that, as a policy, “we do not discuss who may or may not have been approached to address our graduates,” sources from the White House confirmed to CNA that Biden had indeed been invited by the university but could not attend due to scheduling.

Biden, just the second Catholic president since John F. Kennedy in 1960, has not been shy about mentioning his faith in public.

While he’s attended Mass regularly on Sundays, Biden supports taxpayer-funded abortion in defiance of the U.S. bishops’ conference and, as vice president, he performed two same-sex marriage rites. The Biden administration has also started to roll back restrictions on public funding of abortion providers, has supported the expansion of LGBTQ rights and continues to wage a legal battle to keep a mandate in place for doctors to provide gender-transition surgeries.


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Skeptical thinking (from left) about role of religion in President Joe Biden's big day

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Skeptical thinking (from left) about role of religion in President Joe Biden's big day

Back in the early days of GetReligion (we launched on Feb. 2, 2004) I urged reporters not to forget the old Religious Left and, when covering believers in those flocks, not to forget that there is more to their stories than politics. The left is the left because of doctrinal and worship traditions, as well as convictions that align with the New York Times editorial page.

Then something happened that modified my thinking on this subject. Hang in there with me, because I am working my way to an interesting think piece, care of Religion Dispatches. The headline: “The Inauguration’s Beautiful Call for Unity Was Undermined by the Invocation of Religion.”

Faithful readers of GetReligion will remember that, in the summer of 2007, political scientist and polling maven John C. Green spoke at a Washington Journalism Center seminar to a international circle of journalists who came to Capitol Hill to discuss press freedoms in their homelands. But the hot topic of the day was the rise of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and whether he could reach the White House. As I wrote in a previous post about that:

The bottom line: Obama was speaking directly to Democrats in the black church, but he was also reaching out to an emerging power bloc in his party — a group Green called the “religiously unaffiliated.” These so-called “nones” were poised to form a powerful coalition with atheists, agnostics and liberal believers.

Green made a prediction that was years ahead of schedule, in terms of the conventional thinking of Beltway politicos. At some point in the future, that growing coalition of secularists and religious liberals was going to cause tensions inside the Democratic Party.

Five years later, when the Pew Forum released its groundbreaking report on religiously unaffiliated Americans, Green raised that issue once again in a public event. Here’s a bite of the “On Religion” column that I wrote at that time.

[The] unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

This brings us to Biden, today’s Democratic Party and some of the challenges he faces, when dealing with moral, cultural and religious issues in American life.


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This week's podcast: It isn't 'fake news' to recognize that America remains a divided land

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This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was rather unusual. Instead of focusing on a specific bite of news, or a topic drawing coverage, host Todd Wilken and I spent most of our time discussing a new survey that I truly believe is worthy of coverage.

A key element of this study is the role that “fake news” plays in cleaving America into two warring cultures. However, that omnipresent term really isn’t defined. Apparently, when Americans think about “fake news” we are rather like U.S. Supreme Court justices contemplating pornography — they know it when they see it. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

The key is that “fake news” has become the fightin’ word attached to the many ways in which a rising tide of advocacy media is tearing apart the foundation of American public discourse.

Here at GetReligion, we think that there is more to this than mere political bias. For decades, many — not all — American journalists have struggled to do accurate, fair-minded coverage of religious, moral and cultural issues (think “Kellerism”). This trend has now spread into other parts of American life, leaving far too many citizens, on left and right, locked inside concrete news and entertainment silos. For many citizens, the next step is to embrace conspiracy theories or even dangerous forms of rebellion.

All of these themes show up in the new study, “Democracy in Dark Times,” which is the 2020 edition of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s Survey of American Political Culture series. The team that produced it includes a scholar, sociologist James Davison Hunter, whose works — “Culture Wars,” for example — will be familiar to many GetReligion readers.

Think of it this way: This man wrote a book in 1994, a quarter of a century ago, entitled “Before the Shooting Begins.”

The new study, using terms central to Hunter’s book “To Change the World,” seeks to “understand not just the political weather, but the cultural climate shaping the election as well.” Here is a crucial passage — long, but essential — on the role advocacy media is playing:

The American public’s deep misgivings toward governmental and economic institutions extends to a suspicion of the media. Just over two-thirds (68%) of all Americans agree that “you can’t believe much of what you hear from the mainstream media,” and just under two-thirds (63%) believe that “media distortions and fake news” are a very or extremely serious threat to America.


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Good grief! Why won't Hispanics vote like they're supposed to? (With Axios think piece)

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All together now: Good grief!

The other day I shared my frustration with readers, after enduring another elite newsroom story about the “shocking” trends among Hispanic voters in the 2020 elections. It turned out that quite a few Hispanics didn’t vote for Democrats the way that they were supposed to and it wasn’t just Cubans in Miami.

Of course there were economic issues involved. Of course there were efforts to paint Democrats as “socialists” or worse, using labels that really scare lots of voters in conservative Hispanic households (including Cubans, of course).

Of course, there are “religion ghosts” lurking in many of those memories of life in the old country.

Anyway, I wrote a post with this headline: “One more time — Why can't Democrats count on Hispanics, etc., to vote the way they should?” I noted that GetReligion has been running posts on this topic ever since the 2016 campaign in Florida, when there was evidence that evangelical Latinos helped make Donald Trump a winner there. As I said earlier this week:

There’s more to this story than Cubans in Miami. Reporters need to visit megachurches in and around Orlando. Also, if you have ever lived in Texas, you know that the political lives of third- and fourth-generation Hispanics is rather different than those of more recent arrivals. And, again, look for church ties. …

Now the editors need to ponder this truth: Political labels are not enough.

That post was about a New York Times political-desk story that was completely tone deaf to the religion angles in this important topic.

Now, low and behold, that Times team has gone and done it again — this time looking at Miami and its powerful Cuban community, in particular. The double-decker headline states:

How Hispanic Voters Swung Miami Right

Many expected that liberal young Hispanic voters would propel a Democratic wave. But Miami, a city where Hispanics hold the levers of power, confounded expectations.

It was more of the same, of course.


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Podcast: Whoa! An old religion-beat story heated up the politics of Florida in 2020

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If you have followed the religion beat for several decades, you know that one of the most important trends has been the rising numbers of Hispanics — in Latin America and in the United States — who have converted to various forms of Protestantism. Check out this huge study by the Pew Research Center on the Pentecostal side of that trend.

But that’s just, you know, religion stuff. That kind of information isn’t really real until it affects something important — like politics. Right?

That brings us, once again, to the closer-than-expected 2020 showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And, no doubt about it, the Washington Post political desk was impressed with the many hooks that GOP leaders used to reel in lots of Hispanic voters in Florida, which is supposed to be the ultimate multicultural swing state in American politics.

The story considered many different angles, from the usual stress on Cuban conservatism to talk of how immigrants from troubled lands in South America may have been swayed by warnings about “socialism” and images of mobs in major-city streets crashing into businesses and public buildings. The headline focused on one location: “Miami-Dade Hispanics helped sink Biden in Florida.”

There was, however, an important topic missing in this story. Want to guess what that was? This was — no surprise — one topic discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here to tune that in.

This political trend in Florida was so important that the Post produced another story about it: “Democrats lose ground with Latino voters in Florida and Texas, underscoring outreach missteps.” Readers who dug deep into this piece finally hit the following:

The Democratic Party’s failure in Florida to build a permanent campaign infrastructure to target Latinos left the Biden campaign at an early disadvantage, said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and strategist in the state. Amandi said he has warned Democratic leaders about this election cycle after election cycle, but has seen little change.

Although Cuban Americans, who tend to live in Miami-Dade County, have historically been Republican-leaning voters, their commitment to the GOP is not monolithic. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans, whose numbers have grown in the state in recent years, are often assumed to be Democrats. That is not always the case among many evangelical Protestants and those who have recently moved from Puerto Rico.

If you missed that three-word phrase — “many evangelical Protestants” — there was this sentence later:


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How powerful are 'nones' in Democratic Party? That's a complex issue for reporters

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Sorry to bring this up again, but I really have to because of the many religion-news angles unfolding in the final weeks of this year’s presidential race, and lots of U.S. Senate races as well.

Hang in there with me. We are heading toward a puzzling passage in a recent Religion News Service analysis that ran with this headline: “ ‘Humanists for Biden-Harris’ to mobilize nonreligious vote.”

Now, that flash back: Frequent GetReligion readers will recall that, in the summer of 2007, political scientist and polling maven John C. Green spoke at a Washington Journalism Center seminar for a circle of journalists from around the world. The topic was press freedom in their home countries, but most of the journalists — especially those from Africa — wanted to talk about the young Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who was jumping into the White House race.

The bottom line: Obama was speaking directly to Democrats in the black church, but he was also reaching out to an emerging power bloc in his party — a group Green called the “religiously unaffiliated.” These so-called “nones” were poised to form a powerful coalition with atheists, agnostics and liberal believers. They shared, you see, a common cultural enemy on many issues, as in believers in traditional forms of faith. As I wrote in 2012:

On the right side of the American religious marketplace, defined in terms of doctrine and practice, is a camp of roughly 20 percent (maybe less) of believers who are seriously trying to practice their chosen faith at the level of daily life, said Green. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there is a growing camp of people who are atheists, agnostics or vaguely spiritual believers. …

In recent national elections this growing camp of secularists and religiously unaffiliated people have formed a powerful coalition with Catholic liberals, liberal Jews and the declining numbers of people found in America's liberal religious denominations (such as the "seven sisters" of oldline Protestantism). Add it all up, Green said in 2009, and you had a growing camp of roughly 20 percent or so on the cultural left.

The bottom line: This coalition was emerging as the dominant voice in the modern Democratic Party on matters of culture and religion.

In those days, Green was doing quite a bit of work with the Pew Research Center — so this was a foretaste of the information that would create waves of headlines with the 2012 release of the “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise” studies.

At press events linked to the release of that data, Green said, once again:


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Biden 2020: 'Devout' Catholic? 'Cuomo' Catholic? 'McCarrick' Catholic? 'Pope Francis' Catholic?

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Biden 2020: 'Devout' Catholic? 'Cuomo' Catholic? 'McCarrick' Catholic? 'Pope Francis' Catholic?

Joe Biden is a Catholic.

This is a statement of fact, because of his baptism. Vice President Mike Pence is a Catholic, too, by the way. Each man — as is the case with all Catholics — is one Rite of Confession away from full participation in the sacraments of his church. What is Biden’s status? That’s between Biden and his confessor.

Now we get to the tricky question, during an election campaign in which — as always seems to be the case — Mass-attending Catholics are the crucial swing vote across the Rust Belt.

What is the accurate adjective to put in front of “Catholic” in the following equation? Joe Biden is a ______ Catholic. This question was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

If you read the mainstream press, the operative words appears to be “devout.” See this typical overture for a recent USA Today piece: “Donald Trump claims Joe Biden is 'against God;' Biden calls attack 'shameful'.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unleashed another strident attack on Joe Biden over religion … saying his Democratic opponent, a devout Catholic, is "against God" and even religion itself — comments Biden denounced as “shameful.”

“No religion, no anything," Trump told supporters at a brief airport rally in Cleveland as he visited Ohio for an economic speech. "Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy.”

Biden, who has often talked about how his Catholic faith helped him survive the death of his first wife and their daughter in a 1972 car crash, described Trump as a hypocrite making a cynical appeal to religious conservatives.

Trump’s oh-so-typical blast makes zero sense and was similar to the old claims that President Barack Obama was not a Christian. Obama was, of course, active in the United Church of Christ, an oldline Protestant denomination that has long helped define the bleeding left edge of Christianity in America.

So, again: Joe Biden is a ______ Catholic and constantly talks about the role that his faith has played in his life. Has anyone spotted Biden’s chosen adjective? I have not.


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