The BradCast w/ Brad Friedman
'BradCast' 9/18/2024 (Guest: Pastor Doug Pagitt of Vote Common Good on the white evangelical vote)
On today's 'BradCast': Elon Musk, the richest man in the world turned virulent Trump supporter, has gamed his increasingly rightwing social media site to spread dangerous, wildly false lies about U.S. elections that have resulted in threats against elections officials around the country, and suggested the assassinations of President Biden and Vice President Harris. Harris called out the lies of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance that are endangering residents of Springfield, Ohio. DOUG PAGITT, Executive Director of Vote Common Good, explains why the decidedly un-religious Trump still dominates the white Christian evangelical vote, how we got here as a nation, and his group's bus tour through swing states to help Christians understand that they don't have to vote Republican, while helping Democratic candidates learn how to reach those voters.
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big there is a profound responsibility that comes with that. Yep, there is. Well, I don't know why I gave you tonight. Why? I've got to feel there's something right. Oh, there. I can't feel scared any kids I fall off my chair. And I'm wondering how I'll get downstairs. The clouds to the left me joke us to the right. Here I am. I'm not getting rid of you. From Pacifica radio in Los Angeles. This is the Bradcast. That's heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. Also in California in Red Bluff and Redding in KFOI and Round Mountains KKRN. Up in Oregon on the Central Coast on KYAQ. Cartage Groves KSO. Eugene's KEPW. Land Chester, Pennsylvania's W News. Maui Hawaii's KAKU in Columbus, Ohio. Not far from Springfield on WGRN. Pailonville, New York's WLPP. Rochester, New York's WRFZ. Down in New Orleans on WHIB. Out in Gallup, New Mexico on KNIZ. Concord, New Hampshire's WNHN. Fayetteville, Arkansas's KPSQ in Seattle on KODX. Richmond, Virginia's WRWK. Fairmont, West, Virginia's W-E-F-R. Jamesville, Wisconsin's W-A-D-R-M. Minneapolis, St. Paul's, AM950-K-T-N-F. We also stream coast to coast to end around the globe every day on the internet. So the Progressive Voices channel. Net Roots Radio for Humans. NicoleSandler.com. Radio Free Brooklyn. No Lies Radio. D Tour Talk. And most of your favorite podcast sites. Blankening Planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman. Your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker, and all around Swell Fellow, says me from Bradblog.com. Thank you very much for joining us today. Coming up, I'm very excited to speak with him again, Desi Doyan. Are you? I am. I don't think we've done so since just before the last presidential election back in 2020. Am I right about that? I think you are correct. But coming up in a little bit, we will be joined by Doug Padgett, an evangelical pastor who is likely well known to many of our listeners up in Minneapolis, St. Paul on AM950-K-T-N-F. We're used to hosting, I think it was the afternoon drive time show for some years up there, if I remember. Doug is once again on the road in his vote conference on his vote common good bus tour, reaching out to white Christian evangelical voters telling them the truth about Republicans, Donald Trump, and now Kamala Harris to let them know that, yeah, it's okay to vote for Democrats and against a guy who claims to be religious, but is frankly anything but, he's actually the opposite of religious, but for whom, for some reason, religious Christians, at least white religious Christians, at least white male religious evangelical Christians still vote for, for some reason. We will discuss all of that with Doug as he tours the nation with a focus on the battleground states again this year, helping candidates to speak to those voters and maybe even flip enough of them, help them see the light, if you will, that it could ultimately affect the vote on the margins in both the presidential race and in congressional races in swing and right-leaning counties that it could actually make a difference in an election that is likely to be won or lost on those very tiny margins this year. Yeah, you could also frame it as helping drop the scales from their eyes. He will, well done. He will join us, I think, from his bus shortly, but while folks like Doug are reaching out to key voters in key swing states and counties to try and make this world a better place, guys like Elon Musk are using their microphones, which reaches his hundreds of millions of followers on one of the world's largest social media sites that he now owns to mislead voters about the truth and about facts and the upcoming critical presidential election. But of course, that is likely why he is all in for fellow dangerous liar Donald Trump. But as the Washington Post detailed recently, what Musk is doing with his website is causing alarm now for election officials as he has gamed his own social media site to make sure that even folks who do not follow him end up seeing his wildly false messages and baseless lies, yes, about the election. And above and beyond the election itself, his increasingly horrendous posts have also become literally dangerous for the health and welfare of people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who, incredibly enough, Musk suggested in a tweet this week, perhaps they should be targeted for assassination. He received so much blowback for that that he ultimately deleted that tweet and blamed everyone else for just not understanding his great sense of humor. It was just a joke, get it? Hilarious, Elon, keep up the great work, you idiot. But the tremendous power of his microphone and the false information he's able to broadcast over it is now alarming election officials as the election gets nearer. As the Washington Post reported last week, the chair of the Board of Elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania was well acquainted with the regular attendees at his monthly meetings who peddled old debunked voting conspiracy theories. But something changed after April 4th, specifically. The chair, Neil Makija, explained in an interview with the post, that was the day that Elon Musk retweeted a false claim that as many as 2 million non-citizens had been registered to vote in Texas, in Arizona, and in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the same people were coming to the meetings with a new unsubstantiated theory of voter fraud that appeared to align exactly with Musk's latest post. They were convinced that droves of non-citizens were voting illegally in the suburban Philadelphia County of nearly a million people, and of course, they were alarmed by that. In the two years since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, Musk has transformed it into a primary source of false election rumors, both by spreading them himself on his own account, which has 197 million followers, and lowering many of the site's guardrails around misinformation. Musk's online utterances do not stay online. His false and misleading election posts add to the deluge of inaccurate information plaguing voting officials across the country now. Right to the post. Election officials say his posts about supposed voter fraud often coincide with an increase in baseless requests, to purge voter rolls, and heighten their worry over violent threats this year. Experts say Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of myths information. After he bought Twitter, he made deep cuts to the staff responsible for maintaining standards on the site. He courted major right-wing figures, and he reoriented the platform to boost the reach of his own account, which frequently spreads false statements without being subject to the kinds of fact checks that previously existed on the site. Musk has repeatedly claimed, for example, without evidence that Democrats are, quote, "importing undocumented people in order to vote in the coming election," which is a popular 2024 iteration of the racist, great replacement theory, holding that a global elite is replacing European-descended populations with non-white people. Between his purchase of Twitter and the publication of the Post's article about him last week, Musk's 52 posts or reposts about non-citizen voting, one of the main topics of false or misleading election claims that he has made in that time period, drew almost 700 million views according to a post-analysis. A separate analysis found that 50 of his false or misleading claims about the U.S. election between the beginning of January and the end of July this year alone were debunked by independent fact checkers and yet still generated almost 1.2 billion views according to a study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. None of those posts of Elon's displayed community notes, which is what X calls user-generated fact checks that Musk has promised would serve as a "immediate way to refute anything false that is posted on the platform." That's what he said after he filed all the public safety folks and fact checkers over at Twitter. But, of course, they're not used against his posts. You'll see no community notes next to his false claims about the election. Anything that comes from anyone else may be, but not from him. He is exempt. His control of X and his large following means a single post from him can effectively take fringe election denial falsehoods and make them mainstream according to experts. In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said her office tracked a direct correlation between Musk's inaccurate tweets about elections and subsequent waves of harassment of local and state election administrators. Every time he has put out something falsely questioning the integrity of our elections, there's a dramatic uptick in threats and vitriol made to us, she said. In Arizona, Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richard, a Republican, by the way, said that he sees a link between Musk's misinformation and the scores of requests that he and other administrators have received mostly unfounded to remove non-citizens from voter rolls. "He is by no means unique," Richard said. He just happens to have a very, very large microphone. Yeah, well, no wonder with all of this, no wonder that Donald Trump loves the guy now, and yes, vice versa. So there's much more in the post article. I will include a free link to read it if you'd like to see the whole thing when I post today's show at Brad Blog. If you want to see all the dangerous details, but at the end of our show, I think it was on Monday, I talked a little bit about how the media and I include myself in this have failed in recent years in our coverage of Donald Trump and of the Biden administration as well, specifically when it comes to our constitutionally mandated dispensation for a free press in exchange, frankly, as I see it, for a mandate to inform the electorate. That, of course, is the constitutional dispensation that Musk is actually using and abusing now on his social media platform. I've always felt personally, whether it's at Bradblog.com or here in the broadcast or anytime I've appeared anywhere in the media and said anything publicly, including on social media, that I actually have a responsibility to use that microphone responsibly. Now, of course, I do not have the biggest microphone in the world, whether it's at Bradblog.com or on the public airwaves, not only nowhere near Elon Musk's or Donald Trump's, but no matter to paraphrase Spiderman with that microphone and yes, power comes responsibility as I see it. A responsibility to get it right when I report something or even opine about something and a responsibility to use my constitutionally mandated freedom of the press to help educate the electorate where I can. So that when those who go to vote, they'll be able to do so based on facts and reality. I know, crazy idea these days. It probably makes me sound really old, but frankly, that's still the way I think about all of this. And obviously, all of that has become more and more and more difficult and complicated over the Trump years when reality has in many ways, as we've discussed, been sort of turned purposely upside down by that guy to the point where the most unreligious guy in the world is actually the favorite among a huge portion of some of the nation's most religious people, incredibly enough, go figure. And that, I believe, is where the mainstream media have failed. If we had done our job, or at least done it better, perhaps that would not be the case right now. But whether we get it right every time or not, and I always struggle each and every day to do so, you can ask Desi how I torture her about this. We, the media, I still have a responsibility to at least try to serve that mandate along with the power that it has granted me. No matter how big or how small that microphone may be. By my control of that microphone, be it on the show or on the blog or anywhere else, responsibility comes with it. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, speaking at a forum sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists, offered some related thoughts of her own that I would like to play here in full in response to a question about the dangerous remarks that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have offered over the past week regarding the Haitian immigrant population in Springfield, Ohio, the legal, not illegal Haitian immigrant population. As Trump has called them illegal, he should know better. These are immigrants who are here thanks to protective status granted, not only by President Biden, but yes, by Donald Trump himself in the final year of his own administration. Harris spoke not only about Trump's attack on Springfield, which has now become a bit of a police state thanks to dozens of bomb threats that have shut down city hall at times, schools, colleges, hospitals over the past week, but also about Trump's lifelong history of racism and the dangerous power of handing him back, not only the White House, but the powerful microphone that comes with it. It's a crying shame. I mean, my heart breaks for this community. You know, there were children, elementary school children, who it was school photo day. You remember what that's like going to school on picture day? Who dressed up in their best, got already, knew what they were going to wear the night before, and had to be evacuated, children, children. A whole community put in fear. And I'll say a couple things about it. One, you know, I learned a long time ago in my career having a background as a prosecutor. When you have these positions, when you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand at a very deep level how much your words have meaning. I learned at a very young stage of my career that the meaning of my words could impact whether somebody was free or in prison. As attorney general, I was of California, fifth largest economy in the world. I was acutely aware that my words could move markets. When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that. That is an extension of what should not be lost in this moment, this concept of the public trust. To then understand what the public trust means. It means that you have been invested with trust to be responsible in the way you use your words, much less how you conduct yourself. And especially when you have been and then seek to be again president of the United States of America. And so I go back to, it's a crying shame, literally. What's happening to those families, those children in that community? Not to mention what is happening in terms of, look, you say you care about law enforcement? Law enforcement resources being put into this because of these serious threats that are being issued against a community that is living a productive good life before this happened. And spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age old. And look, I said it not very far from here the other day at the debate. This is not new. This is not new in terms of these tropes. This is not new in terms of where it's coming from. And, you know, whether it is refusing to rent to people, rent to black families, whether it is taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times against five innocent black and Latino teenagers, the Central Park Five, calling for their execution, whether it is referring to the first black president of the United States with a lie, birth their lies. And look, the American people deserve, and I do believe more better than this. I do believe that. I know, I know, the vast majority of us as Americans know. We have so much more in common than what separates us. I know that. I know that regardless of someone's background, their race, their gender, their geographic location, I know that people are deeply troubled. But what is happening to that community in Springfield, Ohio? And it's got to stop. And we've got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America, engaging in that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country, is designed to have people pointing fingers at each other. It's designed to do that. And I think most people in our country, regardless of their race, are starting to see through this nonsense, and to say, you know what, let's turn the page on this. This is exhausting, and it's harmful, and it's hateful, and grounded in some age-old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for. So let's turn the page and chart a new way forward and say, you can't have that microphone again. Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists this week, making some good points. Pastor Doug Padgett of Vote Common Good joins us next on the broadcast. I'm Brad Friedman. What the public hears on the public airwaves matters. At the broadcast, we do our best to bring you accurate news and analysis on the issues that actually matter, and we do it all independently without corporate or political influence. But we can't do it without you now more than ever. Please help us stay on your public airwaves by going to Bradblog.com/donate to help keep us going. That's Bradblog.com/donate, and thanks. Welcome back to the broadcast, Brad Friedman from Bradblog.com. Former President Donald Trump has lost some support from Evangelical pastors that according to a new poll. As Newsweek reports today, Evangelical Christians are a key voter block for Republicans whose support for culturally right-wing policies like opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ+ rights have long drawn socially conservative, highly religious voters. High turnout among white Evangelical voters would be key to a Trump victory in November, but his relationship with the block has faced some tension. As his positions on some of these social issues have at times been less rigid than those of other so-called conservatives' notes Newsweek. Witness, for example, his recent statement that he planned to vote in favor of a Florida ballot measure in November that would restore abortion rights in the Sunshine State because he said he felt their current six-week ban before many women even know that they are pregnant was too strict. Only to see him, I believe it was the very next day, reverse that position to say that he now plans to vote against the measure after he received blowback from the very religious anti-abortion movement. But a new poll from Lifeway Research out this week revealed how Trump's support among Christian pastors has changed since 2020. While an overwhelming majority of Evangelical pastors say they are backing Trump, in November, the survey revealed that his support among this group has dropped compared to four years earlier. 61% of Evangelical pastors who responded to the poll said that they plan to vote for Trump compared to 68% in a poll conducted back in September of 2020. So a small drop, about seven points, but still a drop. Despite what appears to be overwhelming support nonetheless from certain segments of the Christian community, it is anything but universal. As the Jerusalem Post reports this week, there is a clear, deep religious divide among U.S. voters heading into the 2024 presidential election, that according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. According to Pew, the majority of white Protestants and Catholics preferred former President Donald Trump, while Vice President Kamala Harris maintained a strong, strong majority with black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, agnostics, atheists, and Jewish voters. Harris' support among Christian groups overall was revealed to have grown compared to Joe Biden's earlier this year, with Hispanic Catholics' support rising, for example, from just 49% then to 65% now. However, the overall religious dynamics of the 2024 cycle, Pew finds remain similar to those from earlier this year, with Trump continuing to dominate within white Christian communities. Interestingly, the Pew survey also indicated a connection between church attendance and support for Trump among white, evangelical, and Catholics in particular. According to Pew, Trump's backing was stronger among those who attend church at least monthly. Now, that in particular has always been wildly baffling to me since I don't frankly ever recall seeing Donald Trump actually attend any church service either before, during, or after his presidency, and yet among those Christians, at least white Christians who do regularly attend church, somehow Trump remains more popular among them than did either Joe Biden previously or Kamala Harris now. It has always been a mystery to me how people of faith, particularly white Christian evangelicals, have been willing to back a notorious, twice divorced, obviously non-religious philanderer who, as I noted, I don't know if I've ever once seen actually attending a religious service. Now, I get it, I suppose, when it comes to those religious single issue voters who are willing to set aside the grotesque moral failings of the actual man because, well, he was willing to do and say whatever was needed to win over their votes specifically, in his case, in regard to abortion and his vow, his promise kept to, in fact, end Roe v. Wade. But his support has been and clearly remains seemingly broader than that among this community. The question is why. But some evangelicals are both trying to answer that question and change the equation once again in advance of the 2024 election. During the last month, Wright's Doug Padgett, the executive director of Vote Common Good, he is also a pastor, they are a group that according to their website, seeks to energize and mobilize people of faith to make the common good their voting criteria. Last month, Christians for Kamala joined the ranks of the many groups supporting Vice President Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz of Minnesota. In doing so, he notes, they stand beside groups as wide ranging as comics for Kamala and deadheads for Kamala. Because Harris has shown she will include us all in her vision for the United States, Wright's Padgett in a recent MSNBC opinion piece and bringing together what has been torn apart. A religious coalition such as this entering the chat, he says, is an important step in the right direction and if built upon could help sway enough movable religious voters in critical battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. What's more, he says, it could mean breaking the stronghold that MAGA forces have on many of our country's evangelical voters. Thanks in part to the cooperation of so many self-identified Christian voters, the MAGA movement has seized control of the Republican Party and helped lead our country down a dark democracy threatening path. Former President Donald Trump and his team know this and it's at the core of their strategy in the lead up to the November election. Compared with 2016, he says an erosion of his support from white men was Trump's biggest problem back in 2020 and his campaign is now working overtime to fix that in 2024. In many places, this means courting white Christian men, especially from the evangelical and Catholic traditions. But central to the work of vote common good, he notes is traveling the country, speaking to voters, particularly evangelical and Catholic voters who are hardwired into voting Republican and working to get them to break out of those patterns. We spoke with Doug Padgett last, I think it was about four years ago, right before the 2020 election during his then bus tour across the country, reaching out to many of these same voters. And as he is well known to our listeners up in Minneapolis, St. Paul, he joins us again today amid yet another bus tour of battleground states reaching out to religious voters and helping, I believe, Democratic candidates to reach them as well. Doug Padgett, welcome back to the broadcast, my friend. Brad always good to be talking with you and great, great introduction there to what's going on. Well, I believe your thank you, your vote common good bus tour now, I think has you in Michigan this week and I want to talk to you about your recent and upcoming forums and what you've been finding, learning and teaching. But I'm hoping you can sort of help me make sense of a few things here, Doug. When it comes to these religious voters who seemingly paradoxically, you know, support one of the most unreligious anti religious guys that I believe has ever held the oval office. So first, do you agree with my assessment there? I certainly do, yes. And look, evangelical voters, they don't need or even want their candidate to be like them. What they want is for the candidate to like them. And frankly, that's true of a lot of groups, a lot of voting groups. So so many of so many evangelical voters long ago gave up the idea that they're going to have a perfect fit for a candidate, which is a good thing actually that they would give up such an idea, you know, thinking that the government should be a perfect match to their own religion. We call that Christian nationalism. What they find though is that Republicans on the whole want evangelical support and want to include evangelicals in their vision for America. They feel that Democrats don't. So for many of them, they feel like their choice is not the king between which candidate is the most similar to them in their own personal belief as a candidate, but which one would give their community access and power. Now it went to an overwhelming level with Donald Trump who basically said to them in a meeting with evangelicals in 2007 and 2016, he said look, you put me in the White House and I will give you power. It's to those familiar with the biblical narrative of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. It was pretty much one of those, you know, tests and the evangelical community took it hook line and sinker, right? And then they've been regretting it ever since. So what's really going on is the Democratic Party has had a pattern and a reputation for not wanting religious voters. Now Kamala Harris is changing that. Joe Biden was changing that. Barack Obama worked to change that. But what Donald Trump exploited was this idea and people who pay a lot of attention to Donald Trump, which I feel badly for any of us who need to. If you pay a lot of attention to Donald Trump, you hear him say things like Democrats hate you religious people. They hate you and they hate your religion and they don't want you to be Christian anymore. Like he does all that sort of, you know, making somehow making evangelicals out to be both the rightful heirs of this nation as Christian nationalists, but then also the persecuted minority and somehow they get to hold both of these views. And I've been an evangelical pastor my entire adult life. I'm from the progressive wing of the evangelical church and we've been working against that kind of mindset for a very long time. But what's really going on is that so many voters, and we talk to them every day, Wisconsin last week, we're in Michigan right now, West Michigan, we're going to run an event here in Grand Haven, Michigan, which is a little hotbed for Christian nationalism on how do you confront Christian nationalism as people of faith and secular organizations? What do you do about it? So we talk to these voters all the time. And so many of them say, I don't want to vote for Donald Trump, but there's no way I could ever see myself voting for a Democrat. And we help them make that exception in this election. And it really is because they feel like they're outside the Democratic Party. They feel like the Democratic system doesn't like them and doesn't want them involved. And Kamala Harris is working really hard to change that election right now. We think it's a good thing. Let me press you on that point. Why do they feel that way? And I think you even said that in recent cycles, Democrats have sent the message that they don't care about religious voters. I don't understand that. I don't get that. How have they done that? And I guess that maybe is the first question. How do they perceive Democrats having done that in recent cycles? Yeah, it's so curious. You know, we train candidates. We have more than 250 Democratic candidates that are part of a common good coalition across the country that we train and support. So we spend a lot of time with candidates helping them figure out how to speak to all groups of people, but including religious people without giving over to what often can be actually a social consciousness within evangelicals that doesn't fit their politics very well. So how do you do this? It's difficult to do for some candidates, but many of them find a way to get it right. So it's really two things. One, Republicans say too much and they say things that are not true. They're regularly telling their faithful that Democrats hate them. And it's not true and it's a lie. And then Democrats just stay quiet. So I'll give you an example. We're working with a candidate running in a Midwestern state. She was in the House in the Senate in the state. She was running and she was running for Congress. At the event that we ran for her, which we do for a lot of candidates, we pull up our bus that says, "Faith, hope and love, supporting democracy for all." And it really speaks religious terms when we try to introduce these candidates to religious voters. And she said, "Hey, I get to do something different at this event than I do at most of my stump speeches." And that is, tell you that growing up, my mom was our pastor. So I grew up as a pastor's kid, right? And she said, so after the event was, and then later in the, in the, in the, in her stump speech, she said, "I've been going door to door here and I keep running into Republican voters who tell me they're Christian and they don't vote for Democrats. They only vote for Republicans because they're Christians." She said, "I don't understand it." So afterward, you're talking and I said to her, "Why is it that you don't including your normal stump speech that your mom was a pastor?" Right? If your mom had been in the military, if your mom had been a nurse, if your mom had done almost anything else, you might have said what your mom did. And she said, "Yeah, I really have struggled with that because I know if I say that in certain Democratic circles, it's not going to go over very well." Now, this is a candidate who's been elected is in the system and knows how it works. We did training with elected congresspeople in Washington, D.C., at the DNC and their training center there. And there were a bunch of them there and we asked them, "We did our training with how you speak to faith voters." And we said, "You start with your own testimony. You never tell people things that are not true about yourself, but do tell them all the things that are true." And one after the other, high-ranking members within the Democratic party as elected officials would say, "Yeah, it's kind of funny. I never bring up the fact that as a kid, my mom was very involved in this or my dad was actually one of the leaders in our church and I don't know why I don't bring that up." So for some reason, in the Democratic system, there's a set of no talk rules about your religious interest or background. And in the Republican party, there's exaggerations and lies galore and you put those two things together over 40 year period of time and you end up in the situation we're in now. And we're working really hard and trying to get that to change. Just by having people tell the truth on both sides. We think the truth is enough in this case. Well, yeah, that's what, and I'm sort of wondering where this notion comes from among Democrats. I mean, is there any sort of data that, you know, show that, "Oh, you know, liberals, progressives won't vote for a candidate if they identify as my mother was a pastor or if they go to." I mean, for crying aloud, you got Joe Biden, you know, a Catholic who, you know, makes no bones about that, makes that very clear, has for years. He didn't seem to run away from that idea. So I'm wondering where these you know, sort of rank and file Democratic candidates get this notion that they can't talk about their religious background. Yeah, it's so curious. You know, a lot of them take more of the John Kerry approach, right, which is personal and private. We're not going to bring it up here. It doesn't have anything to do with my politics. But then there's also a real subtext. You know, if you're going to run for office, you have to be successful at a whole lot of levels. You have to have the party sort of support. You have to raise money. And there is a sense, and I don't know why it's this way, but there's an overblown sense within a lot of the Democratic superstructures that unless you come from the black or Hispanic community to speak about the role of your faith or church life as being prominent in your framing and shaping you for public service, it's not seen as a positive. And we'd like to see that change again. We don't want to make, I mean, we're very careful in our work tonight. We're not asking people to elect Christian candidates. I don't care if someone grew up going to church. I don't care if they grew up with a parent as a pastor. I'm a pastor myself. So a lot of my best friends are pastors. I know that pastors, kids, and pastors doesn't make them the greatest people in the world just because of that situation. That we just want people to, you know, be able to speak fluently and comfortably about things that are true and be able to say things like, maybe your faith has brought you here, maybe your sense of civic duty has brought you here, but whatever brought you here, we're glad you're here. And it's just some little things that people can say and how they can root this in the experience of voters. So it's difficult. Look, we don't know how to talk about faith and politics in the United States. We've been struggling with it from the founding of the country because of our pre-founding narratives where we had some states that were colonies that were built around Christian nationalist narratives and some that were not. And we just have never been good at in the United States. It's a real flaw. So Republicans fail on the side of overextending. Democrats tend to fail currently. But look, this didn't have to be that way. 40 plus, you know, 42, 44 years ago, Jimmy Carter was an evangelical pastor from Georgia. And he got 60% of the evangelical vote. And then Ronald Reagan got 60% of the evangelical vote. And then the two parties almost decided which set of voters they were going to take. In a lot of ways, the democratic structure said to Republicans, "You can have the religious white voters. We'll take the other voters." Now, that would be fine with me if it didn't keep electing someone like Donald Trump. The only reason we're out here doing the work we do trying to get faith voters to consider voting for a Democrat for the first time in their life is because this country cannot stand having Donald Trump having the power of the presidency in this hand ever again. You mentioned a few minutes ago and also in your piece over to MSNBC that the voters and particular voters of the right, evangelical voters, white Christians and so forth really want their leaders to like them. You said that Hillary Clinton, they didn't get the sense that Hillary Clinton liked either Evangelical or Catholic voters. But you argue in your piece that, quote, "Trump" on the other hand probably doesn't like them. But they sure seem to think that he does. This is the irony among ironies. I know Hillary Clinton, I know the people who were on the team for her in her election that were writing post-Christian devotionals for her. She has a very deep personal faith which actually aligns with the faith of evangelical voters. She thinks very highly of them. But publicly it never comes out. Donald Trump derides them behind their backs partly because he knows stuff like what leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. were up to. He had to use his own fixer Michael Cohen to cover up Jerry Falwell Jr.'s own sexual escapades, pool boy and his wife. He's like these people are disgusting at times and he speaks badly about them. So the irony that the public perception is that Hillary Clinton hates evangelicals which he's actually someone who has a very deep faith of her own that many people in that community would admire. Donald Trump says he loves them because he just literally says it. I love you Christians. I'm going to give you power and yet his own life is totally the opposite. So this is just the enigma that we live in in this country and we think they're not going to get Republicans to stop lying but we can get Democrats and Democratic voters to start sharing more access for the, and look we're talking about moving 5-7-8-10% of faith voters. You know you're not going to get, Donald Trump got 81% of white evangelical support in 2016. That number dropped to 75% in 2020. That's why he didn't win in the swing states where he lost. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. He didn't lose, he actually gained among black voters. He gained with women voters. He gained with Muslim voters. He even gained with Hispanic voters. The group he lost. Christian voters in those states and Christian men in particular. Their campaign knows it. We know it. That's why we're out here battling for these these same places. But the narrative is always your crazy Christian uncle is kind of true. I mean I know a lot of those people. But they're also the people who have moved and it's movable. But again I think you could get Hillary, I think you could get Kamala Harris to somewhere being like 72% get Trump's number down to 72% of white evangelicals and if that happens he will not carry those states. Frankly if that happens he won't carry North Carolina or Georgia either. And here's the great thing about what your setup was. Donald Trump is losing these evangelical voters on both the hyper-conservative side. The super-abortion related voters. Because it's becoming clear that he looks down on them things badly of them. Blame them for losing the election. And now once women too in his words have more time to have an abortion which they find in enigma. So he's going to lose two or three percent of those conservative evangelicals. And then he's going to lose even a greater percentage of the moderate to progressive instead of evangelicals which has been around 25% of the voting population. So he could really really be in trouble. And if he craters with that group there's not enough white nationalists in the country for JD Vance to give him access to make up those numbers. It's just not going to be possible. Yeah. Oh well as those who believe in him say from your mouth to God's ears on that one. But you actually have some actual data looking back between Kent County Michigan where you guys put in some time back in 2020. Tell me about that. Were you actually able to see that you moved the needle in these past elections from 2016 to 2020 doing the work that you're doing? Well a big change in a very important state. Yeah unless someone lives in Michigan or the political planet they probably don't know what Kent County or Ottawa and Ottawa County mean in Michigan. But it's western Michigan this would be Grand Rapids. It's a real hot bed. We were at events in Holland Michigan last night and one of the pastors from that area referred to it as the Silicon Valley of Evangelicalism. Like it's the hometown of Betsy DeVos. It's the hometown of big Christian publishers like Zondervand and Baker books and they put out massive amounts of Christian material. They're truly there's not a church on every street corner. There's a church in every street corner with a church in between the street corners. Oh man. I'm literally sitting at us right now in front of a church. We're doing an event tonight and directly across the street 100 yards away is another church. Like it is church-centric up here. And the only two counties in all of Michigan that actually flipped in total numbers from voting for Donald Trump in 2016 to voting for Joe Biden in 2020 or Ottawa County and Kent County. Now you can't flip those districts without a couple things happening. You have to have a good congressional candidate which they have in a person named Hillary Scoldman she's incredible and you also need the evangelicals to turn out because they represent 80 percent of this district of these two districts. So these are the kinds of districts where the the flip happened and the margin of difference in this these two counties was greater than the margin of difference across the state for Joe Biden winning versus versus Donald Trump. Same thing we saw in Cat with Catholic voters in parts of Pennsylvania and with a mix of Catholic and evangelical voters in Wisconsin because religion is not evenly distributed around the country it tends to have little pockets where there's and why that is it's really hard to understand you know it's like understanding how gerrymandering works like why do people who live by each other start thinking like each other right but it happens and so so we know the counties that actually make a difference you know we think that there's five swing states that are going to matter and then those five swing states there's probably nine counties that matter and inside those nine counties there might be 18 districts that actually matter inside the county like it's a treaty number that are going to throw away this election it's kind of it's kind of interesting because in one sense the more sort of religious right some of these areas are the more votes really there are to win back when you're sort of working on the margins in places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and so forth where this is going to come down to potentially you know two or three percentage points here and there they might not win one of these very religious right counties but there's a lot there's a lot to pull from a lot to you know to pull from to help when the state even if they don't win that particular county am I reading this correctly well yeah that's exactly our theory and we were doing an event around the Tim Walz appearance in Wisconsin both in both in Superior and in another place in Wisconsin over the weekend and he said exactly that he said look we don't know if we're going to win this district or this this county but if we can lower the margin of victory here and across the county with certain voters we know that that's going to have this impact because again you're talking about states where the margin of victory was 20,000 people you know right like more people will show up at the college football game than was the margin of victory so if if and you know I'm not trying to teach a simple math class here but when you take one Trump voter in 2020 and that person votes for Kamala Harris that's a two point that's a two vote swing when that if that person just doesn't vote for Donald Trump that's a one vote swing so you could have 10,000 people make a 20,000 vote difference in this election and you know we will personally speak to more than 10,000 people a week in the work that we're doing in this pattern so it's really you know this is just that micro targeting doing this very particular work in certain areas and neighbor to neighbor we have a project called each one reach one so we say to faith voters if each one of you just gets one that impact becomes pretty significant which frankly to a lot of activists feels pretty good they feel like they can't change the world but they might have one person that they could be working on you know just just just the one and the margins we're talking about here that one very well may make a great difference ultimately Doug Patchen I've got just a few more minutes here a couple of points I want to hit you mentioned Tim Walls who you know has sort of pushed the idea of joy to the front of his campaign and I think that we discussed this with you back in 2020 vote common good at the time at commission to poll in swing states finding that it was Trump's lack of kindness that was at the time driving evangelical and Catholic voters away in large enough numbers you wrote to potentially affect the outcome of the election well Donald Trump has not gotten any kinder since then it seems to me and Tim Walls you know presents himself as a person with joy and kindness you know are those voters who are who were driven away in 2020 because of the lack of kindness are they staying away are you finding and is that still an important element in the 2024 race they had started bouncing back to Trump when Biden was still in the race and they're back up for grabs again and frankly every time Donald Trump tries to make fun of Kamala Harris's laugh it goes the wrong way for these people these are folks who just goes the wrong way for Trump he goes the wrong way for Trump gotcha yeah yeah these are people who know that the world should be full of joy and happiness and pets are not something we need to worry about Haitians harming you know this all this nonsense that Trump is spewing in his frowny sort of you know as the governor of Pennsylvania likes to call it is talking of America just doesn't go over very well for so many of these of these people who just want America to be kind and they want to be happy and they don't want their families torn apart by politics anymore that's the biggest thing we're seeing in this election cycle people are like I cannot believe that we are having to deal with this eight years later well you know I do and it raises the sort of one of the last points I want to make you you observe in again in your piece that many Christians are heartbroken at the idea that they have to choose between a faith that's meaningful to them and a political identity that has been wedded to it they don't know what to do and you know when I read that I thought well why why is this so difficult why do they feel their political identity must be or has been wedded to any particular church that they may belong to I don't get that now you know I'm sort of an agnostic Jew so none of this makes much sense to me but how how where did this get the idea that these two are so closely wedded and what can be done about how do you talk to those to those folks growing up their entire lives it's been Christian and a Republican it's just come as a package deal you know we like to say it's like you pulled into Wendy's order the number two and it just came with the fries you didn't know you can ask for a side salad I'm going to people just showed up at church or they went to their family or they had a religious experience and they got around a bunch of people and one of the things they all did was talked about things that said you vote for Republicans it just became normative because frankly most of us we don't actually pick our political identity it kind of shows up and then we struggle with it if we don't like it we work to change it but it's not as if we're just randomly choosing now some people bounce around and vote for this candidate kind of don't care but there's an awful lot of people who've been told their whole life that Democrats are the enemy and they're realizing they're not but behavioral change is extremely slow and we know three things always have to be in place when someone makes a behavioral change whether you're eating you know doing a new diet program or learning to play pickleball or changing your voting habits you have to take in some kind of new information that made you think maybe I should do something different you need someone to invite you to actually behave differently based on that information and then you need a community to participate in where people like you do that new thing and so many of these people they don't have that so we try to create that for them and let them know it's okay it sounds so rudimentary but I've watched people with tears in their eyes including just last night when we say to them if you choose to vote for a Democrat first of all it doesn't make you one but even if it did you're going to be okay and your faith is still going to be alive like people are just like finally someone has said it wow do you have time for just one more anecdote yeah yeah there was a woman who a woman came to our event and she was mid 60s and she had driven an hour and a half and I said wow that's a long way to come to an event like why did you travel so far and she said well I live in a small town and people in my town can't know that as a Christian person I'm not going to vote for Donald Trump wow and I just needed a little encouragement and I said well why couldn't they know and she said well we own the hardware store yeah and she said they'll go to they'll go to Lowe's Wow wow so she knows the reality a lot of people live in in a lot of America that if the word gets out and your business is tied to personal service there's a bunch of people around who think that you've become the enemy Wow and we've got this like enemy hero villain victim narrative thing going so this is the reality that that we face every day and it's not my reality I don't feel that way you know I feel like I mean if I chose to vote differently I'm not going to pay any social cost or anything but for millions of people it works both ways frankly you know yeah you can get yourself kicked out of a whole lot of churches by voting for the wrong wrong group or a whole lot of communities or people that used to consider your close friends I mean I I've lost friendships in my own neighborhood I've lost friendships in my own life over Donald Trump and I hope that when he's no longer a candidate then you know some of those relationships can be repaired it's just really it's really a painful sad thing in religious communities it's even deeper it it is and you know my thinking is the way to deal with that and deal with that divide is not to not speak about it but to speak about it to reach out and to talk to people and that is clearly what you're doing at votecomandgood.com where folks can get more information Doug Pangit is the executive director and co-founder of the group and they will be in the bus and on the road for the next several weeks until election day Doug Pangit you know I say this to many guests over the years but this time I mean it literally you are doing the Lord's work and I wish you nothing but luck and keep it up and please stay in touch in the week's ahead we sure will thanks so much thank you and you by the way you can find votecomandgood on the site still known as Twitter at vote.com and thanks Doug. Thanks so much brother. All right we got to get out my thanks to Desi Doyan our producer and to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us if you missed any portion of today's program download at any time for free at brandblog.com made possible by those of you kind enough to hit a donate button while you're there or go straight to brandblog.com/donate to help us stay on your public airwaves with our microphone it's greatly appreciated. Drop me email if you like I'm Bradcast at brandblog.com on the Facebook's Mastinons and yes I still known as Twitter I am the Brad blog we'll see you there until we see you here next time I'm Brad Friedman good luck world. You're listening to the Bradcast we are 100% listener supported thanks to listeners like you who drop by Bradblog.com/donate