Nonedecision 2020: Four Decades of the None Vote
Next year voters across the country will be deciding on the next president of the United States. In the intervening twelve months I will be looking at different aspects of secularism and politics in the US, focusing in this first column on exit poll results to explore four decades of the secular vote and how it has evolved as the secular population has increased.
Since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, there have been ten presidential elections. According to exit poll data in each of those elections, the majority of nones have voted for the Democratic Party candidate. This Democratic preference has increased substantially in recent years compared to the 1980s; the 1980, 1984, and 1988 elections are the most “competitive” in terms of the margin of victory the Democratic candidates achieved among the nones. Elections in the 1990s (’92, ’96, and 2000) saw support for Republicans hit its lowest points, with nonreligious voters abandoning GOP candidates in large numbers. In the current century (2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections), Democrats have reached their highest level of support from the nones so far.
Only 5 percent of voters were nones in 1980, and they accounted for a small share of the parties’ coalitions. Just 4 percent of Reagan voters and 5 percent of Carter’s were nones. By 2016, 15 percent of exit-poll respondents were nones, less than one in ten of whom voted for Trump (8 percent) but represented one in five Clinton voters (21 percent). It should come to no surprise that as the power of the religious right in Republican Party politics became more evident, secular voters started fleeing. Since the power of Christian fundamentalists has become even more obvious during the current administration, expect the party gaps to remain—or even widen—in the near future.
https://thehumanist.com/commentary/nonedecision-2020-four-decades-of-the-none-vote