The Right to White? Race and Abortion and the Political Behavior of Evangelicals

• In Event: Race and Identity in Political Behavior

Abstract

Racial issues have been brought to the fore in recent scholarship about the white electorate in the U.S. (Sides et al. 2018; Tesler 2012, 2016), but the political motivations of white evangelicals continue to be treated differently. White evangelicals are singled out as “values voters” in assessments that focus on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage to the near total exclusion of racial issues (Baylor 2018; Fowler et al. 2014; Green et al. 1996; Green [2007] 2010). This raises a critical question: Are the racial attitudes of white evangelicals overshadowed by their reliance on issues such as abortion when it comes to voting behavior? Since at least 1980, when the anti-abortion plank was added to the Republican platform, presidential candidates have adhered to consistent partisan positions on racial and abortion issues. Accordingly, it is very difficult to disentangle “values voting” driven by the issue of abortion from political behavior driven by a political division of longer standing in American politics—race. However, at the congressional level there is significantly more variation within both parties on both issues. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies and interest group rating scores we are able to observe the voting behavior of white evangelicals in a wider variety of candidate-position contexts. Specifically, by using survey data that is representative at the congressional district level and supplementing it with exogenous measures of the positions congressional candidates take, we are able to compare white evangelical support for Republican candidates that stake out positions presidential candidates have not—for example, liberal on abortion and conservative on race.

In this way, our project speaks to a dearth of research into the role of racial attitudes shaping the voting behavior of white evangelicals—and a more general dearth of research into the congressional voting behavior of white evangelicals. Even more importantly, our project goes beyond analyses of correlations between the attitudes of white evangelicals and their voting behavior by harnessing contextual variation. The vast majority of religion and politics research and election punditry asserts that the evangelical base within the Republican Party would not tolerate movement to the left on abortion. However, since the vast majority of religion and politics research involves presidential voting behavior, there is virtually no evidence for this assertion beyond the strong correlation between abortion views and voting behavior. Our analyses of congressional voting will provide an empirical look into counterfactuals that have no parallel at the presidential level. We know evangelicals support Republican presidential candidates that are conservative on both racial and abortion issues. What happens to evangelical support when Republican candidates move to the left on one or both of these issues? Is abortion really the third rail of evangelical politics? Our research sheds new light on these and other important questions about the political motivations of white evangelical voters.

Authors

• Ryan L. Claassen, Kent State University

• Andrew R. Lewis, University of Cincinnati

• Paul A. Djupe, Denison University

• Jacob R. Neiheisel, University at Buffalo, SUNY