A year from now the Supreme Court will have ruled on its lollapalooza Dobbs abortion case, we'll know how much permanent damage Afghanistan dealt to the Biden-Harris Administration and -- we can hope -- COVID-19 and Delta may finally be under control.  

Also, journalists will be in the thick of covering a red-hot election for the U.S. House and Senate and the state legislatures.

How will religion play into the outcome? Though church numbers are sliding, reporters shouldn't forget that more than with many other factors, religious participants by the millions provide readily organized activists and voting blocs.

There could be clues in Pew Research Center's report last week offering the last word on religious voters in 2020, with some comparative information from its 2016 post-election report. Rather than exit polling, Pew analyzed responses from 9,668 members of its ongoing, randomly selected American Trends Panel who were verified as having actually voted by checking commercially available lists.

White evangelical Protestants went 84% for Donald Trump's re-election, which is not surprising but remains significant for Republican strategists (and for this movement's own societal and outreach prospects). Pew says they gave Trump "only" 77% in 2016, slightly less than was shown in exit polls and a bit below Mitt Romney's 2012 support. 

But evangelicals always go Republican. That’s no surprise. Equally predictable was the Democratic loyalty with Black Protestants (91% for Joseph Biden) and the collective category of Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians (64%). 

More intriguing is the situation with white Protestants who do not identify themselves as "evangelical," a catch-all group of mostly "mainline" or relatively liberal churchgoers.

Despite church bureaucracies that are often politically on the left, these home folks continue to lean somewhat Republican, giving Trump 57% in both 2020 and 2016. And what do we make of the following? The less these voters regularly attended  worship the more likely they were to favor Trump, the reverse of the pattern with white evangelicals and Catholics. 

That brings us to the evolution of the two other chief voting blocs, the all-important white non-Hispanic Catholics and the rising population of Americans who lack any religious affiliation, the so-called "nones."  

As The Guy has written, white Catholics mostly continued traditional Democratic Party backing through 1960 but since gradually shifted Republican, a major socio-political change and a major problem for the Democrats. By Pew's count, in 2016 they went 64% for Trump but slipped to 57% in 2020. Did that reflect some Catholics' aversion to Trump's track record, or solidarity with fellow Catholic Biden? Will either factor be at work in 2024? Pay heed. 

Pew does not have data for Hispanic Catholics as such, but their Democratic majority is reflected in the numbers for Catholic voters over-all, a classic swing vote. They went 52% for Trump in 2016 and 50% in 2000. 

Among the "nones," those who said their religious identity is "nothing in particular" gave identical 61% support to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. But the smaller category of outright atheists and agnostics posted a dramatic 17-point Democratic lurch from 69% in 2016 to 86% in 2000. As GetReligion writers have been noting for a decade, these numbers presumably loom large in present and future Democratic Party behavior. 

The sharp religious divide between the two parties continues to be troubling. But so is the partisan split over whether to trust national news organizations collectively, shown in a simultaneous Pew Research report. During the Trump era since 2016, Republicans expressing at least "some" trust have plummeted from 70% to 35%, with a 14% slide since just late 2019. Among Americans over-all, 58% retain at least "some" trust but only 12% have "a lot" of trust.  

These data should provoke careful reflection by everyone in the business and especially the new Associated Press executive editor, Washington Bureau chief Julie Pace, 39, a frequent talking head on CNN and MSNBC. She succeeds Sally Buzbee, now executive editor of the Washington Post.

When the "legacy media" appear untrustworthy, where do citizens look for information? 

FIRST IMAGE: Illustration shared by the Nevada Secretary of State.