Religious progressives have initiated an effort to suppress voter turnout among conservative Christians for President Donald Trump, Religion News Service reported.
Anti-Trump Christian groups are running advertisements in swing states to support Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
These ads either condemn Trump for not being sufficiently Christian, or they explicitly endorse Biden and Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
“The policies of a new Biden-Harris administration will be built on principles that more closely align with our Christian beliefs,” said Rev. Noel Anderson, who co-founded the New Moral Majority PAC, in a press release.
The support for Trump among Bible-believing Christians in 2016 surpassed that of George W Bush in 2004 (78 percent), John McCain in 2008 (74 percent), and Mitt Romney in 2012 (78 percent).
Trump garnered 81 percent support from those who Pew Research describes as “white, born-again/evangelical Christians.”
There is little indication that Trump is losing the support of this demographic.
In fact, recent polling suggests that he has gained their support.
The vast majority, 72 percent, of white evangelicals stated in a June 2020 poll that they approve of Trump’s job as president, while 82 percent of them stated that they would vote for the president in November, Pew Research reported.
These numbers suggest that the nominally Christian groups that declare their principled objections to the president rely on corporate-backed astroturfing for their survival.
One Catholic social justice group called Network said it will spend $50,000 to run anti-Trump advertisements online in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona that target Christian voters. They will appear on Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
Network’s ads claim that Trump is not “pro-life” because he supports the death penalty and has not been proactive enough in addressing poverty, despite his administration’s efforts to increase employment and wages for American workers.
The group will attempt to convince Christians that there is a moral equivalency between the murder of innocent babies and the state-sanctioned killing of convicted criminals.
The ads will direct voters to “PopeFrancisVoter.org,” which offers quotes from Francis and advise to Catholics against voting for Trump.
“The sacred issues the Pope asks us to bring into the voting booth include protecting people in poverty, the elderly, and migrants and rejecting racism,” the website says. “Prayerful consideration of the candidates for President make it clear: Catholics cannot be true to their faith and vote for Donald Trump in November.”
Lee Morrow, the elections manager for Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, who heads the anti-Trump campaign, said “Catholics cannot be single-issue voters.”
Morrow echoed Democratic talking points about Trump purposefully trying to “divide us” during the “COVID-19 pandemic.”
Vote Common Good, another leftist Christian organization, has partnered with the Never-Trump Lincoln Project, to run advertisements in Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio.
Vote Common Good and the Lincoln Project will work to turn white Christians, “who have lost patience with Trump’s behavior or been disappointed with his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protest movement against racism,” to vote Biden.
