How do Episcopalians vote?

[_.]

So I decided to dive deep into the data of the CCES 2021, which was taken in the year 2021 by Harvard's Cooperative Election study and it involved 25.7K respondents including 346 Episcopalians making up 1.3% of the population.

It breaks down voter totals into each tiny little religious tradition: Southern Baptist, Orthodox Jewish, Shia Muslim you name it.

However of course it might be a little bit funky because of the weighting that they applied to make their survey match the actual results of the elections, so don't take it as the gospel. These numbers I'm about to show you are weighted.

Just hopefully it can show us some interesting things:

All national survey respondents

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2016?

47.7% Hillary Clinton
46.2% Donald Trump
6.1% Other

65.3% Turnout

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2020?

51.2% Joe Biden
47.7% Donald Trump
1.1% Other

72.6% Turnout

Episcopalians

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2016?

63.3% Hillary Clinton
31.1% Donald Trump
5.6% Other

81.9% Turnout

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2020?

64.6% Joe Biden
34.3% Donald Trump
1.1% Other

86.1% Turnout


Now this tells us three things. Firstly, that Episcopalians are a high-turnout group. Secondly, they have favored the Democratic Party over the last two elections. Thirdly, there was no major swing over the last two elections (the margin tightened a tiny bit, but that seems more like a consequence of third-party Republicans returning home).


This survey is so detailed that it in fact breaks episcopalians down further into Episcopal Church in the USA, Anglican Church (Church of England), Anglican Orthodox Church, Reformed Episcopal Church etc. etc. but sample sizes are getting really small at that point.


Another thing is that the CCES does a new survey every year, and midterm and presidential years both have 60K respondents instead of 20K. I might come back in a year with the results of those if I remember to

[_.]

I wouldn't be surprised if Episcopalians are a bit more Republican than you all think--probably still Democratic, at least since 2016, but they still are very much an elite white conservative church in the South.

There's also the question of how devout someone needs to be to be considered a member of a certain religion.  For example, I would imagine that people who attend Episcopalian services every Sunday are still a good bit to the right of the overall population that would check 'Episcopalian' on a form.  Also, are we counting more conservative Anglican congregations as Episcopalian here?

I saw this and this got me interested, so I went back into the CCES 2021 data to try and do this breakdown.

According to the CCES, 24.2% of Episcopalians attend religious services weekly or more (as compared to 23.5% of the general population).


Episcopalians who attend church at least weekly

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2016?

57.1% Hillary Clinton
34.9% Donald Trump
8.0% Other

80.1% Turnout

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2020?

63.1% Joe Biden
36.9% Donald Trump
0.0% Other

82.7% Turnout

Episcopalians who do not attend church at least weekly

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2016?

65.2% Hillary Clinton
29.9% Donald Trump
4.9% Other

82.5% Turnout

Who did you vote for in the election for President in 2020?

64.8% Joe Biden
33.8% Donald Trump
1.4% Other

87.2% Turnout


This is to be taken with a little more skepticism as now we're running with a sample size of 82 for Episcopalians who attend church weekly while 264 don't, and all these are still being weighted.

However, interestingly the correlation is not a large one (it was much larger back in 2016 though).
It might be a denominational difference, and hopefully the upcoming CCES 2022 with a sample 3 times larger will answer these questions more thoroughly.