How do Episcopalians vote?

[King of Kensington]

I'm guessing that they're D from 2016 on...

[Podgy the Bear]

Agree--they are rapidly moving away from the Repubs (if they ever were so) and going Dem or independent.

[Bismarck]

My guess would be 60-40 dem but I’m not sure. The days when Episcopalians represent any kind of elite are long gone. Today they are just a normal mainline denomination with above average levels of income and education.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

According to a pew research poll from 2016 they broke D+10 with 12% being other. I imagine the gap has widened since

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/23/u-s-religious-groups-and-their-political-leanings/

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Agree--they are rapidly moving away from the Repubs (if they ever were so) and going Dem or independent.

If my facts are correct, the Episcopal Church in the '50s was often referred to as "the Republican Party at prayer."

Even today, most mainline "liberal" Protestants vote GOP, but they're also on the whole whiter than non-mainline Protestants. The higher education and wealth of Episcopal parishioners, combined with liberal social views, easily makes them a D-voting bloc now.

[Roll Roons]

Ancestrally Republican, but have swung hard towards Democrats since 2016.

[Indy Texas]

There are so few Episcopalians in America at this point that even getting a sufficient number of respondents in a poll would be a struggle.

Religious surveys indicate there are more Muslims in America today than there are Episcopalians.

[Del Tachi]

They may be D going back to 2008, even.

[King of Kensington]

Yeah, likely a lot of "Obama Republicans" among them.

[Sol]

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.

[Gass3268]

Would it be fair to say that Mainline Protestant Christians outside of the South are now a solidly Democratic block?

[Biden his time]

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

[100% pro-life no matter what]

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?

[Biden his time]

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.

[King of Kensington]

They used to say "Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans."  Now Episcopalians are voting more like Jews.

[It’s so Joever]

They used to say "Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans."  Now Episcopalians are voting more like Jews.

And Puerto Ricans soon might be the furthest right of the three.

[RI]

Episcopalians around here run about 75-25 Dem. Roughly equivalent to UMC and a little to the left of ELCA or PCUSA.

Those who attend ACNA churches or similar are roughly the inverse.

[King of Kensington]

I assume a lot of people with Episcopalian parents or grandparents are "religious nones."

[TDAS04]

Probably to the left of members of other major Protestant denominations, except the UCC.

[Del Tachi]

An interesting proxy for this would be the partisan breakdown of Episcopalians in Congress. 

There are 19 Episcopalians in the House.  10 Democrats and 9 Republicans.  Interestingly enough, it appears there's going to be somewhat of an Episcopalian exodus from Congress later this year:  Al Lawson*, Kurt Schrader, Tom Rice, Jim Cooper, and David McKinley have either retired, already lost renomination or are unlikely to win reelection.

The D-R split among other major denominational groups is as followed:  Catholics (75-52), Methodists (16-13), Lutherans (7-8), Presbyterians (5-9), Restorationists (0-4), Orthodox (3-4.)  Baptists were surprisingly more evenly split than I imagined, 23-31.  By far, the largest Protestant denominational group in Congress is "unspecified" with 83 members (26 Democrats and 56 Republicans.)

*I found it interesting that there are currently two Black Episcopalians in the House:  Al Lawson and Frederica Wilson.  Is the AME church being counted as Episcopal? or are they Black members of the U.S. Episcopal Church? 

[LabourJersey]

An interesting proxy for this would be the partisan breakdown of Episcopalians in Congress. 

There are 19 Episcopalians in the House.  10 Democrats and 9 Republicans.  Interestingly enough, it appears there's going to be somewhat of an Episcopalian exodus from Congress later this year:  Al Lawson*, Kurt Schrader, Tom Rice, Jim Cooper, and David McKinley have either retired, already lost renomination or are unlikely to win reelection.

The D-R split among other major denominational groups is as followed:  Catholics (75-52), Methodists (16-13), Lutherans (7-8), Presbyterians (5-9), Restorationists (0-4), Orthodox (3-4.)  Baptists were surprisingly more evenly split than I imagined, 23-31.  By far, the largest Protestant denominational group in Congress is "unspecified" with 83 members (26 Democrats and 56 Republicans.)

*I found it interesting that there are currently two Black Episcopalians in the House:  Al Lawson and Frederica Wilson.  Is the AME church being counted as Episcopal? or are they Black members of the U.S. Episcopal Church? 

There are plenty historically black Episcopalian parishes in the US. For instance, St. Mary's Foggy Bottom is a historically black congregation that's existed in Washington DC since the 1860s. Here's the history, which isn't too uncommon: https://www.stmarysfoggybottom.org/about