On Oct. 31, Claremont McKenna College hosted “Religion, Race, Gender, and the 2024 Election Conference,” a unique opportunity for community members to learn about and discuss voting trends for different segments of the electorate in the 2024 election.
CMC’s Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Salvatori Center for Individual Freedom in the Modern World and CMC’s Religious Studies Department collaborated to facilitate the event, which featured several panels throughout the day.
One of the event organizers was Gastón Espinosa, a professor of religious studies at CMC, who focused on this subject for the ongoing research for his upcoming book.
“The conference [will] look at 10 different groups: Blacks, Latinos, Asians, seculars, Jews, Muslims, women, Catholics, Protestants and Evangelical [people],” Espinosa said. “These 10 segments make up the vast majority of the American electorate, and there’s been a lot of volatility in their voting patterns over the last six months.”
Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University, discussed the effectiveness of deracialization as a strategy for campaigning, particularly in the post-Black Lives Matter Movement era. In political academia, deracialization is defined as when candidates intentionally avoid emphasizing their race, choosing to instead focus on key issues in their community.
“Candidates of color have to grow a multiracial coalition in order to be elected,” Gillespie said. “Kamala Harris usually tries to be pretty transcendent, because California is a majority-minority state where she puts this broad coalition together. But she’s doing this now in a post-Trump, post-Black Lives Matter era where racial issues are more salient than they were in 2008 and so to not talk about racial issues actually causes you to lose credibility.”
During the second half of the conference, James Guth, professor of political science and international affairs at Furman University, discussed the importance of secular voters and their role in the 2024 election.
According to Guth, the most secular groups, such as agnostic and atheist groups, are increasingly leaning Democrat. Compared to the 2020 election, a Cooperative Election Study showed that atheists and agnostics have exceeded average participation rates in donating money, contacting public officials and posting a political sign in favor of Democrats.
Next, Jerry Park, associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, gave a presentation titled “Religion and White Christian Nationalism among Asian American Voters in 2020,” presenting research that found that religious affiliations and religiopolitical ideologies matter for Asian American voters in the 2024 election.
In his presentation, which featured data from September 2024, he shared findings demonstrating that, while Asian ethnic groups largely favored the Harris-Biden campaign over former President and current president-elect Donald Trump, some Asian Americans also expressed support for white Christian nationalist views.
According to Park, he found evidence that white Christian nationalism played a big part in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
“This is interesting because Asian Americans were present at the Capitol,” he said. “You can see a Korean flag waving in the pictures taken that day.”
His presentation concluded with statistics to show that while some Asian Americans endorse white Christian nationalism, the majority shift more toward Democratic preferences.
“Only conservative Protestant Christians voted favorably toward Trump in the 2020 election,” Park said. “The majority of other religious groups like Muslim and agnostic Asian Americans were most favorable to Biden.”
Following Park, conference organizer Espinosa led a presentation on how Latino voters would impact the 2024 election.
Espinosa’s findings show that between the 2020 and 2024 elections, there was a significant growth of registered Latino voters in key swing states such as North Carolina by 10.7 percent, Georgia by 10.5 percent and Pennsylvania by 8.9 percent.
“This is important because there is a major Republican shift for Latino voters,” Espinosa said.
Espinosa says two reasons for this Republican shift are economics and religion. His presentation stated that a growing number of Latinx voters are evangelical Protestants, adding that 65 percent of Latino Protestants support Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris. However, overall support among Latino voters leans towards Harris.
“In this upcoming election, 39 percent of Latino voters are leaning towards support for Trump and 57 percent of voters are leaning towards Kamala Harris,” he said.
Ismail Iftikhar CM ’28, who helped coordinate conference logistics, shared insights from attending the panel of Dalia Fahmy, director of international relations and associate professor of political science at Long Island University. Fahmy discussed Muslim perspectives on the 2024 election, noting that fewer Muslims are aligning with the Democratic Party due to a shared sense of betrayal.
“This was interesting to me because I would’ve assumed that regardless of the Biden administration, Muslims would still favor Democrats, even if it’s the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument,” Iftikhar said.
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