New Data Shows Democrats Are in Deep Trouble With People of Faith
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In this episode, Brad interviews Doug Pagitt, Executive Director of Vote Common Good, about the Democratic Party’s challenges with religious voters. They discuss the results of a major new survey showing that many Christians view the Democratic Party as hostile to religion, and explore the importance of identity, inclusion, and outreach in political organizing.
The conversation covers the need for Democrats to better engage faith communities, the role of narrative and belonging in voter behavior, and the impact of recent changes to the Johnson Amendment on churches’ political activity.
Doug shares insights on how candidate quality, intentional outreach, and building a “big tent” coalition are crucial for future electoral success, emphasizing that both religious and non-religious voters must feel welcomed and valued within the party.
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We all know that the 2026 midterms are going to decide the fate of this country.
They are one of the last walls we have against full-blown authoritarianism.
But as we look forward to those elections, we have to face a harsh truth.
The Democratic Party has a preposterously low approval rate from even those who vote Democrat.
One of the things I've said for a long time is that somehow the Democratic Party has made it that religious voters and non-religious voters both think that the party doesn't want them and doesn't care about them.
Today I speak to Doug Padgett, the executive director of Vote Common Good.
Doug has had a long career in ministry and in politics.
He's an activist who is all over the country, leading campaigns for voting, for democracy, and a stand-up for marginalized people.
But Vote Common Good has just finished one of the largest surveys ever done about religious voters in the United States.
And what they found is that an overwhelming number of Christians in this country have a very negative view of the Democratic Party.
may be thinking, well, who cares?
Aren't those all MAGA Christians anyway?
People who will never think about voting for any party except for the Republicans.
But that's just not true.
As we lay out in this show all the time, Christianity in the United States is diverse.
It includes mainline Protestants, progressive Catholics, and many others.
The long and short of it is that without Christians voting for Democrats in the United States, the Democrats cannot win.
Doug and I talk about this problem and what to do about it and much more.
I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War, the Extremist, History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Mundi Media.
This is Straight White American White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, and great to be with you on this Monday.
As I just said, I welcome today a first time guest, which is astounding to me and makes me feel like I've really blown it as a host of this show, but that we're going to hopefully rectify some of that today.
I'm going to welcome Doug Padgett.
Doug, thanks for being here.
Well, Brad, I'm a big fan of this show and a big fan of yours, so this is a real treat.
Well, likewise, and appreciate all the work you do at Vote Common Good, we're going to talk about that and what you found in a recent survey that I think can be helpful data.
It might be scary data, but I think it also can be helpful as we start to think about 2026.
But let's start here.
Did a lot of work in and around the DNC in 2024, and you did work to try to get voters of faith connected to the Democratic Party.
You were at the DNC.
You were working with folks.
You were working with people like Sarah Levin at Secular Strategies, who's also part of the push to get folks who are of faith, people of no faith, feeling like they are part of the Democratic big tent, especially young people, people under 35.
What did you walk away feeling from that, from all of those interactions, whether at the convention or just in the run-up to 2024, that might be just worth sharing on a personal level that will kind of provide context for some of the data we're going to get into.
It's been interesting.
I've been in religion as my profession my entire adult life.
I got into Christianity as a late teenager and was just sort of right away involved.
working at a church when i was 19 and you know i'm 59 so i've i've been at that church leader thing for you know what And the similarities, frankly, between the work that I wanted to do inside of Christianity, trying to open Christianity up to everyone so that it wouldn't feel like it was a private club that was going to reward some people and either keep out or punish others.
That was a big narrative in the Christianity that you run into all around the world.
And I never thought that that matched the faith.
I never thought it was good for people.
Interestingly, as now I do this work in politics, which I've been doing since 2018, nearly full time since then.
I'm trying to do the same thing with the Democratic Party, frankly, trying to help the big tense party, which I think the Democratic Party is, to actually welcome everyone and not keep people out and not punish people.
And so, okay, there's a set of skills and kind of a worldview that I've brought to both of these areas of work.
and because i'm doing them together now frankly trying to help religious voters consider that they can vote for a democrat and still maintain their faith if that's something that's important to them and also helping democrats know that they can welcome faith voters and openly acknowledge that they're there since they make up the the the
It's a complicated world we're in.
So, you know, being at the DNC, man, it was, first of all, people probably know if they listen to your show because you keep people so well informed.
The Democratic National Convention is actually a big convention, like a lot of other conventions somebody might go to.
You know, there's booths and there's workshops.
And, you know, at night we see on television, you know, people choose to watch it or watch little clips of it, kind of the big events.
But all day long, starting at seven in the morning until, you know, 10 o'clock at night, there's all kinds of things going on.
So we were a part of all of that, running workshops, had a booth there.
And it was kind of remarkable, frankly, to be an outward-facing organization.
We were there under our brand of Catholics Vote Common Good because we reach out in lots of different ways to different religious communities.
And hearing all the people at the DNC come up and say, we are so glad to see something of faith here.
And, you know, one small little booth, a couple of workshops in the whole thing that, as you mentioned, Sarah and a number of other people contributed on it was really great.
But out of the hundreds and hundreds of workshops and the thousands of people, this little bitty dot of anybody acknowledging faith.
It was odd and it was odd to see how many people were thrilled and how many people were uncomfortable.
So it felt to me like, boy, there's a lot of work to do.
I think there's a lot of people listening who are going to be in some of those places of I used to be part of high control religion.
I used to be part of fundamentalism.
And so now when I think about even venturing anywhere near the Democratic Party, I don't want what I take to be.
or what my experience tells me is the incursion of religion into politics, right?
That's what I'm used to is we're here to colonize, conquer.
We're here to make everybody conform to our worldview.
And that's that's the goal.
And we're We're, you know, as I think about Vote Common Good, as I think about the work you're doing, I think about a strange situation where things are so far the other side, especially in the inner workings of the Democratic Party, that there's another problem.
And I think it's the problem you're trying to address, which is the Democratic Party, many folks who are leaders in that party, folks who are.
hired to be consultants and who are elite in some way.
And I hate using that word because I don't want to sound like Rush Limbar or Charlie Kirk, but folks who are elite in the sense that they have a say in the Democratic Party.
is this fear that religion will chase people away because the only form of religion that one associates with politics is that kind of fundamentalist takeover colonizing type and that's just another way that that type of religion has won because there's no room for right something like a form of religiosity that is pluralist that is open that is lgbt affirming that is one
Did it feel that way as you were the lone religion booth at the DNC where there was just so much activity and so much money spent to make sure people knew about programs, vendors, training possibilities, whatever.
It did.
And I've also realized, look, America's a big country with, you know, I don't know, 350 or 380 million people, 150 million who will choose to vote, and, you know, a third of eligible voters who don't.
So it's a big, complex system.
And because our organization has us traveling all over the country, I was in northwest Washington state last week.
I was in Arkansas.
I'm going to be in North Carolina.
You know, like we're in all these varying places.
It's a big country with a lot of opinions and a lot of different groups and a lot of regionality and a lot of race.
And there's a lot going on.
And I think the Democratic Party can absorb all of that.
It doesn't have to say to any one group, you know, we're going to, it's not going to be a regional party.
It's not going to be for some people and not for others.
I think it can embrace, it can embrace all.
And because our work is not trying to get more religion into politics.
We're not trying to get more.
democrats to be religious.
We're trying to get more religious people to vote for democrats.
That's what we want to do.
I believe in this day and age where we're living right now, you know, on whatever it was, August 6th, 2025.
I think people like me have a moral obligation to win elections.
I think it matters to such a degree that human morality, human dignity, human goodness needs to be sure that the MAGA movement does not continue to maintain political power at the federal level, certainly, and at the state level.
So we have to win.
So what we want to do is to include for some very practical reasons, like there are just so many religious people in America.
And we just did a big survey on religious identity and political identity.
And we were shocked at what we learned there.
I'd be glad to tell you about some of that as we go.
But there are just so many people who deep down in their core of themselves identify as Christian, as Jews, as Muslims, as Hindus.
It's just, it truly is a deep settled part of American culture.
And I know that there's a lot of people who want there to be a religion-free world.
I mean, good grief.
There are days I kind of long for that.
You know, I mean, I just see how religion works.
And, you know, I've worked at it my whole life and I've invested in the industry and I got a master's degree and all this stuff.
Been a pastor for so long.
And some days I think, God, wouldn't it be great if that all didn't exist?
But I think that about a lot of things, frankly.
I think, would it be great if a lot of things were just so fundamentally different and we were starting from a different building block?
So there's this difficulty that we have of saying include voters in your voting coalition and don't feel like you have to turn over your political party to those people.
I mean, frankly, having watched Republicans do that, see, you know this, that Republicans used to be this odd coalition of like fiscal conservatives, some social conservatives and then they had like the religious conservatives and they always kept them at bay you know they kind of like wouldn't turn it over to them and then they did and now we've got you know the the mashup of people inside this Trump administration that's not good for anybody to have to have that happen.
And I think the antidote to that is to hive off more and more religious voters from whatever tradition they come from, be sure that they're deeply settled inside the Democratic Party as a comfortable voter, to stunt the ability.
of Republicans to continue to run the table across the largest religions in America.
And look, I just think this is, I think it's obvious, but worth saying.
You can't be the majority political party in America and ignore the majority religion in America.
You just can't.
So don't.
And the best thing for Democrats is they don't have to.
Look, 55% of all the people who vote for presidential candidates who are Democrat are white Christian voters.
65% are Christian voters overall.
70% are religious voters.
Literally the base of people who vote for Democrats.
55, 65, 70%, depending on how you want to sort them, are these voters.
If we increase that number by 3% to 5%, Republicans won't win a national election again.
Yeah.
So that's what we're up to.
And I actually think inclusion is the best way to limit fundamentalism.
I thought this way in religion.
I think this way in every hobby that somebody's in.
Boy, you get into a closed system of some people with power and control.
And power and control wants to limit and exclude.
The best response to exclusion is inclusion.
So let's find ways to include voters without giving up the essentials of what it means to be a Democrat, of course.
So I want to jump into the survey and I want to look at some of that data you've already mentioned.
It's really worth looking at.
Before that, I feel like there's probably someone driving.
I know there's probably hundreds of people driving and doing the dishes right now that are like getting a little nervous.
So we got to, we got to, we got to, we got to see if, I want to see if, if, if I've got you the right way so that.
that some people listening are not going to shut this off and say you know what's going on over there Your argument, as I understand it, is this.
goal is not for some kind of religious takeover of the Democratic Party.
The goal is not for one religious group or even a Christian coalition of people to take over, quote unquote, the Democratic Party.
The goal is not to elevate those values above others so that others are silenced and not part of this alliance and coalition and network of people who are trying to vote for one party over the one that's been given over to MAGA.
What you're pointing out is one of the facts that I think is probably uncomfortable for some some people It's a little bit uncomfortable for me sometimes to think about it, but it is true, and that's this.
When a presidential election happens, not everyone in this country votes.
Of the people who do vote,, whether it's 2016, it's in the 70 percentiles in 2020 and 2024, it's in the high 60s of percentiles of people who voted who are Christian.
Okay.
And so if you take a country where 70 percent of the adults who vote are Christian, you have a very simple argument, which is to say the Democratic Party, one of the two major parties, is going to have to find a way to reach those Christians.
You're the one who's all over the country.
Here's my guess.
Those Christians are going to look like Episcopalians in Connecticut.
They're going to look like United Methodists in Omaha.
They're going to look like some of those wayward evangelicals who are like, I'm not sure I can keep doing this anymore with MAGA for name the hundred reasons.
They're going to not be the same kind of Christians.
They're going to be black AME folks in South Carolina.
going to be a mixed race congregation of Catholics somewhere in, in Northeast California, the far reaches of California.
But the argument overall from you is.
The goal is to say, if you want to win and not have MAGA anymore, you're probably going to have to do a much better job as a party finding ways for those people to feel like they're welcome into the tent.
They should come in and they can go home feeling really good about voting that way, at least in terms of their religious morals and values.
Is that fair?
I'm just trying.
It's very fair.
I'm telling you right now, Doug, there's people driving right now who are like, these guys have lost their mind.
They want to cater to Christians.
They want to leave everyone behind.
The only kind of Christianity that enters politics is the conquest imperial version.
So I'm trying to like, yeah, I hear you.
And look, I don't want more religion and politics.
I want less.
I mean, I'm somebody who advocates for, I don't think we should have chaplains in the Senate.
I don't think we should be opening any civic events with religious narratives or prayer.
I don't think we should have chaplains in the military.
I've got a whole thing about separation of church.
I want separating our religion from our politics.
every single time we can.
What I don't think separating our religion from our government is telling people who have a religious motivation to their life that they're not welcome to vote in your party.
That is not separating religion from politics.
That is separating people from your party.
The truth of it is, it's not a good idea and it doesn't work to tell people what should motivate them to be on your side.
It would, I mean, I grew up as a non-religious person.
My family experienced religious bigotry and all the kinds of stuff that goes on for non-religious people in America.
I totally agree with it.
I mean, somehow I managed to raise a bunch of non-religious kids at the same time, you know.
So I've got them on both sides of me.
I'm a sandwich generation.
I have no qualms about that.
But the majority of people in America do think that religion matters to them.
And our survey told us a lot about that.
I know we'll talk about this in a moment, but this doesn't mean that they attend religious services.
It doesn't even mean that they self-identify inside of a faith to have it sit somewhere deep in their root core of what it means to be a person of goodness.
How they think about God is not necessarily how they think about religion and spirituality.
So look, people are complex.
And the fact that such a great majority of people in America have said, my religion matters to me.
I mean, you ask a lot of Democrats how many.
How many atheists are there in America?
You ask a bunch of Republicans that, you know, in that world.
And they'll say things like 30, 40 percent, you know, this kind of thing.
I'm just saying it's not, that's not the case.
There aren't that many.
Like we have such a misunderstanding of who the electorate is and what motivates them.
And when you look at why Trump gained with black voters and Hispanic voters and young voters, The cross tab on that is inclusion of religion in the Republican Party and exclusion of it in the Democratic Party.
So what so many people have f thought was safe.
Like, oh, we're going to get Hispanic voters because, you know, we've got an advantage there on policy.
And we're going to get black voters because of some historic voting patterns.
That didn't happen.
It didn't happen in 2024.
It didn't happen in 2022.
It did happen in 2020.
Joe Biden got the highest number of evangelical and Christian votes since any Democrat, of any Democrat since Jimmy Carter.
He outdid Barack Obama.
Those gains were lost with Kamala Harris's campaign that we worked so hard to help her get elected.
I want to win elections and I want more people in America to feel aligned with the Democratic Party and not aligned with MAGA.
And if people are telling us this is what matters to me, we've heard it for so long.
I mean, I've heard it for my entire adult, my entire life and heard rumors of it before I was alive.
People saying the Democratic Party is the godless party.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's almost as if...
And I'll tell you, Brad, I have had people in the Democratic Party.
We work at all kinds of levels.
We work with Congress people.
We work with senators.
We work with presidential campaigns.
We're all over trying to help this happen.
Actually, the Democratic Party is right now in August of 2025 more interested in expanding the electorate than they ever have been in, well, at least in the last 12 years that I've been working on it.
I've had people though tell me, Hey, I understand the voters you're trying to reach.
And one of them who was in the Obama administration, a high-level campaign strategist, said, I. I would rather lose elections than win with those people.
That's crazy.
I'm tired of catering to them.
Yeah.
Demographics are on our side.
They need to take a back seat.
We don't need them.
If, according to your survey, 58% of Christians see the Democratic Party as hostile to Christianity and 54% see the same traits among Democratic voters.
So here's my guess is of that 58% of Christians who see the Democratic Party as hostile to religion, a good chunk are MAGA Christian Trumpists.
And there's very little chance of convincing them of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, any of those people being morally good, much less somebody they could vote for.
But I think what you're saying is there are others, and those others fall into many different categories.
They could be, like I said, center right or center left United Methodists in the Midwest.
They could be evangelicals who are trying to find a way to stay Christian and also vote their conscience and feeling like it may be one or the other.
There's a lot of different, it's also Catholics, if you look at vote, and I know you know this better than me, Catholics and especially white Catholics, they go back and forth depending on the election.
They voted in a majority for Biden.
They did not for Harris.
They did not for Clinton.
Historically, white Catholics can be swayed depending on who's in the presidential race.
So that's one.
And I guess what I want to ask you is, what are the strategies not just to get more Christian voters, but to get different kinds of those Christian voters?
is that's a question.
And I think the next question is, when the Obama official says, I'm tired of catering to those people, is he saying or she saying, I'm tired of catering to the...
Are they saying I'm tired of catering to people who are just religious and I don't want to even deal with that anymore?
What are they actually gesturing toward?
I think when this campaign and administration person said this to me, I think what she was getting at was, as a Democrat, we think the thing that moves people is policy.
Okay.
And I think she's just dead wrong about that.
Policy is really important to reinforce political identity.
Policy is not the reason people change their political identity.
Feeling like you're part of a movement is what causes people to change their political voting habits.
Now, if there's people who are listening now and they have only voted for one political party their entire life and they've never had the experience I'm about to describe, but if they have changed their views and we meet with a shocking number of people in the Democratic superstructure, who have never voted for anyone but a Democrat.
Yeah.
So they don't know what it would feel like and be like for someone to say, I don't know, I used to only vote for, you know.
for Democrats and now I'm voting for Republican or the other way around.
That's not a lived experience they have.
So they have to hear from others.
What's that like?
But for the people who are considering making a shift, they don't do it over policy.
They do it over the sense that these are the people that I'm going to vote for who make me feel like I am a good person for joining them and voting for them.
Look, almost all of us allow our politics and our religion and frankly a lot of the other things we do, the brands we buy and the way we spend our money and the sports we're involved in because it tells us that we're a good person and we're crafting a narrative about what does it mean to be somebody who's fulfilling your responsibilities and living life in a way that's honorable.
Politics serves a very small part of a person's political identity.
Now, some of us, you know, like, I mean, I'm in this stuff all the time.
People are like, so what do you do?
I'm like, I work in religion and politics.
So my political identity is overblown compared to your average person.
And frankly, compared to my own life in other times.
Donald Trump has done this to me.
So.
What I think the person was saying, what a lot of Democrats think is, well, we have to change our policy for these people to vote for us because they're like, it's about abortion.
And that would be a simple thing to believe if you only listen to what other people tell you about why people vote the way they vote.
But you travel the country or you do the work like that we do online and face-to-face meetings and with hundreds and hundreds of congressional candidates around the country, meeting people all the time.
They're not basing their politics on policy.
They don't even know most of them.
What policies there are.
They have a general sense of good people and I don't like those people.
You know, that kind of thing.
What we say to candidates when we work with them all the time is, look, the one thing Donald.
Trump has shown you is that you don't have to be like a religious person to get the vote of a religious person.
I mean, that guy is nothing like them.
What is the attraction?
I'll tell you flat out what so many people have told me, what religious leaders have told us.
And if we listen to even the most extreme religious leaders, and I know you've listened to in your professional work more than nearly anyone, and you have to deal with all of that, is they say, hey.
Donald Trump's not a choir boy.
Donald Trump's not a good guy.
But Donald Trump has our interests in mind.
And any of us who look at this are like, really?
like really no he doesn't but they feel included so we say to candidates and political parties and state parties and everything candidate candidates can simply say to voters i see you i like you and we need you and if you say that people are shockingly willing to give it a look What they feel like, and a lot of us feel like, is the way I feel about Republicans.
I feel like Republicans have no interest in my well-being.
They don't care.
They want to command and control every element of government to my detriment and the detriment of people that I care about in this country.
That's what I believe about current Republicans.
I didn't used to believe it.
I do now.
There's a huge swath of Americans who believe that about the Democratic Party.
How do you prove that to them?
Well, you start sometimes by literally saying it and then start acting like you want them around.
Look, the Democratic Party uses a thing called the van, which a lot of people know about if they've ever gone door knocking or made phone calls.
or have received some political ad, you know, in their mailbox.
That's because there's a list that says these are potential voters for Republicans, potential voters for Independence, potential voters for Independence.
for independents, potential voters for Democrats.
That thing is called the van, the voter access network.
The van for Democrats does not include religion of voters as a field.
They don't care about someone's religion.
They took it out in 1992.
Republicans use religion as the second, third, or fourth sort.
every time they're going to do outreach.
In fact, Donald Trump's political campaign outsourced to Charlie Kirk the ground game for a presidential campaign.
Yeah.
To that joker.
And they won.
Yeah.
And they got the.
So, okay, what can we do?
Pay attention who religious voters are.
Reach out to them.
Ask them.
Most Democrats that we meet with, they don't even know how to reach out to pastors.
Yeah.
Or rabbis.
They just truly, they don't even think about religion as an organizing principle in America.
And religion for a lot of Americans.
is a significant organizing principle for lots of things that matter when you get married and and deaths you know all the things that religion does so this is what we're talking about and we truly believe and the reason we believe it is when you poll voters on their beliefs about policy, they agree with Democrats.
Yeah.
70, 75% agreement on positions held by Democrats.
When you say that's a position held by Democrat, the number drops to 30, 33%, almost consistently.
There is a near 40% gap, not in the policy, in the identity.
Okay, so what can we do about that?
Believe that it's not about policy, recognize it's about identity, and get busy.
and start doing some work and start inviting some people.
And frankly, it's not all that complicated.
You know, you can, because look, here's what Democrats do well.
They do it well with black voters.
in America, religious black voters, are more conservative than their white counterparts.
You put them on a survey and say, what do you believe about the Bible theologically?
The trend says, oh, if I just read this, it would say, oh, this is probably a Republican.
the large majority of black religious voters in this country vote Democrat.
So why do 90% of conservative Christian black voters vote for Democrats and upwards of 80 percent of conservative evangelical voters vote for Republicans.
It's not religion.
It's not policy.
It's identity.
Yeah.
So we can chip away at that identity.
And frankly, that's what the that's what MAGA did to my great horror and utter shock that they chipped away at Hispanic and black and other immigrant voters.
Well, and I see this in Asian American communities as well.
And so here's part of what I hear from you and part of what I've been thinking since 2024.
And then I want to propose my grant.
I'm going to solve this on this call, on this interview.
So I just want you to be ready because I have the solution.
So it's going to come.
You can send me the consultant fee later, or I guess the DNC, have them bill me.
But when you talk about identity, here's what my ears are ringing with is in the 2024 election, all of the talk about the manosphere, about gender, about sex, about sexuality, about pronouns, this touched on a lot of the people who were in the world.
on identity because there was those voters out there who were not super into politics.
They are not the kinds of people who are reading Vox and Politico and the New York Times and anything else about politics.
They're not you and me who are just in this stuff all day, every day.
And a part of their identity was like family and culture and togetherness.
And what got into the water for many of them was, well, yeah, Donald Trump is for you and Kamala Harris is for them.
So I'm going to sort of jump in with the group that's going to protect family, protect.
And that meant in some ways protecting patriarchy, protecting things that I think you and I are in agreement are pretty toxic.
When I hear you talking about identity, I hear you talking about story, the story I tell of myself, and I need to join up the story of me with the narrative of a larger group.
And if that is politics, that means one of the two parties in this country.
How do I join up the story of me, the story of my family, the story of who I wish I could be, and I want my family to be and the country I want them to live in with this party?
And unfortunately, the Republicans do this in ways that are so effective and also so toxic.
They tell you you can be part of a larger story by fighting these others who are demonic and want to hurt you and your children and want to destroy everything you've worked for and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So what I hear you saying is there's a need to go beyond, hey, if you vote for us, we'll let you be who you are and leave you alone.
Because that's not identity.
That's not narrative.
That's not inviting you into a tale that says we're going to do something together that is restorative.
that is affirmative, that is going to build a world that is somehow better.
And one of the things that the Democratic Party has pulled off somehow is to make religious voters, especially Christian voters, feel like they're not wanted.
But you talk to Sarah Levin.
You talk to folks who are working with secular Democratic voters.
I mean, and I straddle these worlds, right?
I go to atheist conventions.
I'm in churches all the time speaking.
And the atheists are like, the Democratic Party hates us.
They don't want us.
And the Democratic Party's magic.
They convince non-religious and religious voters that they're both not welcome.
Look, that is spot on.
And it's heartbreaking, almost to the point that people don't want to believe it.
They don't want to believe that...
That there's good guys and bad guys.
Look, politics is built.
around this terrible hero, villain, victim narrative.
It's really harmful.
And it is built in.
And I believe we have to, as humans, get beyond a hero, villain, victim narrative, both to grow up as human beings and as society, but also to function and get into a human sojourn narrative, which is that there's times where we do good and there's times where we harm and there's times where we're journeying together and we have to understand this in a really better way.
But politics continues to reinforce it.
And, you know, we do it too in our organization.
So I'm not walking around with my hands clean.
You know, I'm Pontius Pilate over here.
So I feel pretty guilty of it as well because it works in the short term.
It's like a donut for breakfast.
It makes you feel like you're full and ready to go for the day.
That's good.
Yeah.
We have to get beyond it.
And the Democratic Party has somehow found a way to have an approval rating of about 25% among Democrats.
people who vote for Democratic candidates.
Okay, so it has a serious brand.
Now, what should have a brand problem is mega Republicans.
Yep.
All the things they have done and then all the things the Democrats did.
And somehow Democrats end up with a worse approval by brand across every sector, every demographic.
How is that happening?
Okay, there are some things inside the Democratic Party where you say like, well, the Republicans have this way of saying who's in and who's out.
Man, I will tell you, I mean, just to be frank, Brad, I'm in a lot of places.
And the level of anxiety that I have about saying the wrong word, about making the wrong point.
point and being completely cut out is extraordinary.
And so, you know, as somebody who's like, I've run as a Democrat.
I vote for Democrat.
You know, I used to vote for Republicans, but I've run for office as a Democrat.
I've spent 20 years trying to work on Democratic successes.
People are still like, yeah, I don't really trust a religious guy.
Like, you're okay.
I'm not sure what you got to do to get the trust of this party.
So.
Those things are what I think at this struggle you're talking about for people to be able to say, I feel like my story is intertwined with the Democratic Party story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, look, one of the people running, one of the most beloved candidates who seeks the presidential nomination every year doesn't identify as a Democrat.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, wow.
Okay.
It's got a brand.
There's a brand problem.
Yeah.
When you try to suggest a solution to the brand problem, it does tend to cut across a lot of stakeholders feeling like they're doing pretty well.
And there are a lot of stakeholders inside the Democratic superstructure that feel like it's advantageous for them.
There's a lot of people who think it's okay for a lot of reasons in politics to have the other party in presidential power.
I don't.
I think winning that office, I mean, we over-focus on the presidential race.
And the reason we do is because we watch what someone like Donald Trump is doing to this country from that single position of power.
And we think it's a moral, there's a moral necessity to be sure that people don't.
People like him doesn't have that control in his hands anymore.
I think the emergence of Mamdani is showing you who's happy where they're at and who actually wants there to be change in the country.
I think the emergence of someone...
And it upsets a lot of folks and they're not sure they want that.
And so I'll just say, I hear you, but I'll just say, I don't think mayoral races reflect the nation.
And we can't be doing that, even though that's maybe what I want or you want.
That's not how our system is set up, is to find the most...
I think our national election in 2024 told us a lot about it.
And frankly, I'll have to say this in a moment again, but there was a lot of sexism.
Oh, sure.
In that election, the Democrats who voted for Joe Biden and didn't vote for Kamala Harris.
was a serious part of the problem.
I mean, Donald Trump got more votes.
He got like 62 million in 2016.
He got 72 million in 2020 and lost.
He got 77 million.
Now, I still, every single day, I say to myself, I don't understand how this is possible.
But Kamala Harris lost votes.
There were a lot of factors going on.
I understand it.
And sadly, people who would choose to vote for Democrats at one time, there's a lot of reasons they don't.
And I think the gender of Kamala Harris.
had a lot to do with it.
And I think that's why they leaned in so hard to all that.
They, them, and the masculine stuff and the bros and Elon Musk and all that.
Yes, it was policy.
Yes, it was identity.
And it was also go at the heart of what so many people.
in this country still struggle with.
Well, and heartbreaking.
But I think what you're pointing to is something, so two comments.
I want to come back to the mayoral idea, but I think, you know, we can look at who voted for Joe Biden and we can see more religious voters, especially more white Catholics voting for him.
And there's a conundrum here, and it's not one we're going to solve in the next few minutes, which is Joe Biden was a Catholic white man who was able to pull some of those.
religious voters to him because of that identity.
So the answer cannot be, well, the only way to win is if you run a white Christian guy.
And sorry, anyone in the Democratic Party who is a woman, who is not a Christian, who is not, I mean, even Pete Buttigieg, who's gay.
I mean, he's always talking about being a Christian.
He's always talking about his family.
Sorry, Pete, you may not be the guy, not based on policy, but based on your identity.
There's a conundrum there.
The sexism, of course, we can say it all day, every day, built into the Kamala Harris.
Sentiments across the country built into the Hillary Clinton stuff 10 years ago and so on.
I think for me with the Mondani and the, you know, what's happening in the Twin Cities, there's also things happening in places like Omaha in a mayoral race where there's going to be a black Democrat who is the mayor of Omaha is to me not that that's how the electoral system works across the country.
It's not this North Star that goes forward for every election.
I think for me though it is those candidates, at least Momdani in particular, he is more popular than the other two Democratic.
frontrunners combined and that includes Jewish voters for a man who is Muslim in a time of really, really difficult debate about anti-Semitism.
You know, Jewish voters, their identity, the feelings about what's happening in Gaza and so on.
So my point with those is that those candidates are not what the consultant class wants.
What we need are to find folks who fit the national election cycle, who actually want to win.
And they're probably, as we've been trying to talk about here for 45 minutes, not going to be the choice of that consultant class who's making.
three and four and five hundred grand a year doing great and if the election wins or loses they're still doing great and the goal is actually not for there to be change and this is why the democratic party has a branding problem is because a lot of folks are like well There's a lot of you, whether it's Nancy Pelosi, whether it's Chuck Schumer, whether it's the consultants who are, you are better than way most than 99% of us.
So win or lose, Chuck, win or lose, Nancy, win or lose consultants.
You know, we don't believe in you.
And this is part of the branding problem, too.
And I think we got to make sure to go.
It sure is.
Yeah, sure is.
And look, candidate equality goes a long way.
Yeah.
Even more than candidate identity.
Now, no, look, I will say that Joe Biden's success with religious voters was in part for some Catholics because they saw themselves in him.
But his gains were because they organized.
intentionally for voter outreach.
They stopped doing it in 2024 with all the nonsense going on inside that cluster.
And the Harris campaign refused to do it.
Okay.
They didn't even do it in black churches.
But when they did, you mean outreach to religious resources?
They didn't even, the Harris campaign didn't even do significant.
Black voter engagement and outreach.
There was a whole, they somehow didn't fund the last 100 days poll workers in black churches and souls to the polls.
Like, okay, so you're 100% right.
We are not, we don't even think you should be running Christian candidates to get Christian voters because you can run a Christian candidate that doesn't reach out to Christian voters and you're not going to get them.
You can run someone like Donald Trump who reaches out to Christian voters and you can get them.
And the same with the Jewish community and the Muslim community.
Candidate quality and candidate execution truly can make a three to five point swing.
It's not going to be 30 points.
We're not going to solve it.
But if you're in a race where you might lose by a percentage or two, you can win by a percentage or two with candidate quality and all kinds of things.
And here's what we know.
When a candidate is willing to reach out to religious voters, they're also doing a whole lot of other things to reach out to people.
Yeah.
In other words, they're just a candidate that says, we want to reach out to people.
I mean, that's how we became so close with Katie Porter and with Ted Lou and these deep Democrat, not at all, you know, Katie Porter's not really a religious person.
Yep.
But she's like, but I want religious people to vote for me.
So I'm, you know, and I actually like people.
So that's the key to all of this.
And the Democratic Party's ability to squeeze itself into the smallest possible vehicle to drive itself to the election pole is maddening, just frankly maddening.
That to me is where, like, you know, the Mom Dani example to me in this case is similar.
And people are going to be like, you're crazy, but I don't think I am.
It could be Katie Porter.
It could be Ted Lou.
But if you are the kind of person who has a natural affinity for the people you're going to serve and you go to those communities.
And you see, like, when you see Mom Dani on the commercials, like, and he's in New York City, he just loves New Yorkers.
Katie Porter is from Orange County, California, where I grew up.
It's like, that could not be as.
different from Queens or the Bronx, but Katie Porter is the kind of like, hey, I'm in my minivan.
Who's around?
Who wants to talk?
Are you at a Methodist church?
Let's get in here.
Yeah.
You're over here at the like synagogue in Orange County.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
You're, you know, who are you?
I'm in.
You're, you're part of the Vietnamese community that is, is huge in that part of the, the, the county.
Let's talk.
I was at a, I was at a festival this, this past weekend.
Japanese-American Buddhist Festival that happens every summer.
It's called Obon.
And if you're a Japanese-American, you go to Obon.
It's everything you just said, Doug.
It's not because for everybody there, they believe in karma.
They believe in the Buddha.
But for many of the folks going, it's like, well, I'm Japanese-American.
That's what we do.
That's where my people are.
That's where my food is.
That's where my music is.
That's where my culture is.
My grandmother is going to be mad if I don't show up.
I'm telling you right now, if some white dude running for like assemblymen showed up at Obon, was participating, eating, nobody would be like, well, is Homboy Buddhist or not?
Is he one of us?
We would be like, you wait, you came here to Obon to hang out with us?
Yeah.
That's all you want.
You're eating our food.
You learned about what we do here.
Thank you.
We're in.
Like, we're down.
Like, let's go.
Here's my solution.
I know we got to go.
You and I. I'm sorry sorry if if if if here's my solution and then then you tell me what you think and then we'll get out of here.
I I kind of think we still need the victim not victim and we back up.
I think we need the hero villain story a little bit.
And it's because people, that's how they enter politics, not.
And I know as a Christian pastor, you're like, I wish we could move past it.
And I hear you.
When I think about the villains in the story that we need to invite people into, I do not think of immigrants.
I do not think of gay people.
I do not think of trans people.
I do not think of women, I do not think of...
I don't think of humans.
I think of AI, climate crisis, and those who want to destroy the lives of, So if you are a fascist, if you are somebody who wants AI to replace human beings, or if you are the climate crisis, we've got a chance, a once in a species chance to defeat those enemies and create some semblance of a future where we flourish,
we live together, and we make a livable planet community state for all of us.
And what we need is this.
And here it is.
The future is uncertain.
The future is unpredictable.
We, none of us knows everything or nearly everything we need to know about this time.
So you know what we need?
We need a big tent where the wisdom of the secular organizer in Denver, the UMC pastor in Omaha, the black AME bishop in Atlanta, the atheist group up there in the Twin Cities who's just doing great stuff.
Shout out to y'all.
You all have wisdom.
You all have insight.
You all have contributions to make to the story that we are all going to write and the ways that we're going to defeat the villains of the AI that wants to replace us, the climate crisis that will make this place unlivable.
livable and the fascists who want to make us think that we are not human.
So who's ready to get in here and do that together?
It's not a matter of tolerating each other.
It's a matter of saying the collective wisdom and insight of these groups will actually lead us to a place of not only mutual learning and respect, but actually a chance against.
against these enemies.
Have I inspired you?
Do you want to like tape that for a DNC commercial?
I mean, I don't.
Can we send that out?
Is there a chance coming my way?
Okay.
I hope people would be onto it.
And every tradition can find its amen to that, right?
In the Christian tradition, it would be our battle is not against flesh and blood or people.
It's against powers and principalities that seek to destroy.
So yeah, there's a lot of things we can be struggling against, fighting against each other.
That's a different organizing process.
I completely agree.
I just want to leave people with this one thing from the survey that we did.
This is Big Poll.
It's the largest poll that we know of directly after Christians and Christian identity and political identity.
87% of the people in the poll who had only ever voted for a Republican as self-identified Christian said they'd be willing to vote for a Democrat.
87% who've never done it.
Now, are people always a trustworthy narrator of their own experience?
Well, I don't know.
But it's a big difference.
You know, I'd rather think about the 87% than the 13%.
Yeah.
I think there's 13 to 30% who just aren't ever going to.
But there's 87% who say to themselves, I would.
And what's the kind of things that would motivate them?
It's just all the things you just mentioned.
Outreach, inclusion, conversation.
meeting someone.
We do all this work on what caused someone to change from one voting pattern to another.
And it was always a little information that changed, some crisis of belief and then a community.
And they had to have the community to join.
But sometimes it was online, sometimes it was, you know, in direct, directly politics, a lot of different ways.
It's just how people are.
Yeah.
People don't behave differently when it comes to their political vote than it does to the rest of their lives.
And sometimes in politics, we think that about each other because we look at someone and we're like, I actually kind of like that guy.
But then he talks about politics and I can't stand him.
So we think there's something broken there.
And I would just encourage us to humanize religion and to humanize politics and say, these are people mostly, mostly.
trying to do their best and they don't feel like they have a lot of good tools to figure out their religion in this age or their politics in this age.
And you put the two together and they just feel like, I'm going to go think about something else.
Yeah.
All right.
We got to wrap.
I want to ask you one more bonus question, but before I do that for subscribers and for those who are part of our Discord, Vote Common Good, where can people find the work you're doing with the survey, but all the other programs that you're doing to invite people into some of the story we talked about just now?
Yeah, all of our stuff is at votecommongood.com.
We do a lot of work around immigration.
We do a lot of organizing.
We do campaign work.
We can get people connected with people in the red to blue flip districts all over the country for Congress and getting them actually tied in.
So lots of ways to get involved there.
And then some version of vote common good on all the socials.
Sometimes, you know, that's too many letters.
So it's vote common.
Sometimes it's common good.
So yeah, just hunt around.
And there's a lot of votes and commons and good groups out there.
And we like all of them actually.
So any of them you found would be fine.
But if you go to votecommongood.com, you'll find.
you'll find our organization there.
There is a lot of great, you all are doing great stuff with the fight to protect immigrants.
And if you're looking for a place to get involved, friends, this might be the place that you would plug in, because I will say there's great stuff happening over there.
Advocate Common Good with Doug and the team.
you you All right y'all, thanks for listening today.
We are so thankful that you are here.
I'm going to ask Doug a few more questions about religion and politics and the ability for churches to endorse political candidates and the cancelling of the Johnson Amendment.
If you're subscribers, stick around.
And if you're not, it's a great day to think about becoming one.
You can sign up for 40 bucks for the entire year.
All the infos in the show notes.
It would be a huge help.
Don't forget, subscribers, tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26 is our recording of the monthly bonus episode and you are invited.
Bring your questions, bring your beverage and come hang out.
