The non-religious are now the country’s largest religious voting bloc

[trotsky]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/14/the-non-religious-are-now-the-countrys-largest-religious-voting-bloc/

More American voters than ever say they are not religious, making the religiously unaffiliated the nation's biggest voting bloc by faith for the first time in a presidential election year. This marks a dramatic shift from just eight years ago, when the non-religious were roundly outnumbered by Catholics, white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants.

These numbers come from a new Pew Research Center survey, which finds that "religious 'nones,' who have been growing rapidly as a share of the U.S. population, now constitute one-fifth of all registered voters and more than a quarter of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters." That represents a 50 percent increase in the proportion of non-religious voters compared with eight years ago, when they made up just 14 percent of the overall electorate.

"In 2008, religious 'nones' were outnumbered or at parity with white mainline Protestants and white Catholics," the survey's lead researcher, Greg Smith, said in an interview. "Today, 'nones' outnumber both of those groups."

The growth of the non-religious -- about 54 percent of whom are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 23 percent at least leaning Republican -- could provide a political counterweight to white evangelical Protestants, a historically powerful voting bloc for Republicans. In 2016, 35 percent of Republican voters identify as white evangelicals, while 28 percent of Democratic voters say they have no religion at all.

So in previous elections where Democrats lost (Kerry '04, Gore '00), some (on DU and elsewhere) suggested part of the problem was that non-believers had scared away Christians and the religious from voting for our candidate. How things have changed.

[struggle4progress]

1. Do they vote as a bloc?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. They're pretty reliably Democratic

http://www.pewforum.org/2016/07/13/religion-and-the-2016-campaign/

Black Protestant is more reliable still (very); Hispanic Catholic is more Democratic in 2016, and I think was also in 2012, though the numbers in that survey don't look as though they were enough for them to give as a separate group. But the non-religious are more Democratic-supporting than Catholics or Protestants. White evangelicals are very reliably Republican, while other white subgroups tend to be Republican, but only just.

[edhopper]

3. I bet they vote as a bloc

against Christian assailed who want to make religion the basis of our laws.