Who Would Jesus Vote For? ‘Unkind’ Trump Or ‘virtuous’ Biden.

A NEW survey conducted by what The Christian Post calls a ‘left-leaning’ Christian activist group asked respondents who Jesus would vote for in the upcoming presidential election – and Trump came in ahead by one percentage point.

The group in question is Vote Common Good, a voter mobilisation nonprofit that has been holding events in swing states in an effort to persuade evangelicals not to vote for Trump.

Its finding show that:

Across Evangelicals and Catholics, 28% say Jesus would vote for Donald Trump in 2020 and 27% say that he would vote for Joe Biden.

About 23% said Jesus would not vote and 22% said Jesus would be equally likely to vote for either candidate or they didn’t know.

That’s the fun bit about the survey, called the “Presidential Candidate Vice and Virtue Poll: Swing State Evangelical and Catholic Perceptions of Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden.”

The serious bit won’t please Trumpites. The survey indicates that a perceived absence of kindness in Trump’s character could draw 11 percent of faith-heads away from the President in swing states.

The poll, which claims to be the largest survey of swing state faith voters in the 2020 cycle, is made up of responses from 1,430 respondents who are registered to vote and reside in the one of the swing states of Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

The survey was designed and analysed by a team of behavioral scientists representing institutions such as Duke University, the University of Maryland, the University of Southern California and the University of North Carolina.

An analysis of the data states:

The 2020 election is currently on track to produce an 11% swing towards Biden compared with 2016 among Evangelicals and Catholics, averaging across both Christian denominations and all 5 swing states surveyed.

Among swing state Catholics, the new report suggests that 2020 is on track to produce a 16% swing toward Biden, who himself is Catholic. The report suggests that there will be a 7-point swing in favor of Biden when it comes to evangelicals in the five battleground states.

These findings will give a big dose of the sads to Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, above, former apostolic nuncio to the United States. According to far-right Christian website LifeSiteNews he “hinted” that he believes God will see to it that President Donald Trump will be victorious in the November elections.

I believe that this faith in God, which clearly must be matched by a consistency of Christian life and witness, will also confirm in the 2020 US presidential election that ‘the Lord’s right hand has done mighty things’ as Psalm 117 reminds us.

Claiming that Biden is a fake Catholic, Viganò said:

What is clear is that Catholics cannot vote for, much less the hierarchy approve, a ‘Catholic’ politician who does not put the integrity of the Church’s doctrine into practice. The self-styled Catholic Joe Biden, who supports partial-birth abortion, i.e. infanticide, and who even before Obama supported gender ideology and celebrated the ‘marriage’ of two men, is not Catholic. Period.

The poll comes after the Biden campaign said it planned to make more of an effort to reach out to voters of faith than the Clinton campaign had in 2016. Additionally, NeverTrump conservative groups have also spent millions on advertising in an attempt to convince voters of faith that they should not vote to re-elect Trump.

The poll also asked respondents how they evaluated Trump and Biden against seven biblical virtues and sins. According to the study, the perception that Trump’s lack of “basic Christian kindness” is the strongest driver of defecting from Trump in 2020.

Disaffected Trump voters may generally be willing to forgive Trump’s perceived sins, “but not his perceived lack of basic kindness,” the analysis reads.

This pattern was consistent across both Catholics and Evangelicals, as well as across males and females. It was also present for younger and older respondents alike, but especially strong among older respondents, who are especially likely to defect from Trump because of a perceived lack of Christian virtue.

About half of the respondents rated Biden as “more virtuous” than Trump while 39 percent rated Trump as more virtuous than Biden.

For Catholics, the biggest defections from Trump in the survey came in North Carolina (22 percdent swing), Pennsylvania (20 poercent swing) and Wisconsin (17 percent swing).

Vote Common Good Executive Director Pastor Doug Pagitt, of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis and a prominent evangelical Trump critic, said in a statement:

Trump’s lack of kindness will likely cost him the election. Four years ago, many religious voters decided to look the other way and give Trump a chance, but after witnessing his cruelty and corruption, some of them are searching for an off-ramp.

Some conservative Christians are unconvinced and note that Trump has accomplished many of the promises he laid out to fundie supporters before his 2016 election in regard to abortion, federal judges, Israel and religious freedom.

Tim Head, Executive Director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, which is spending millions to get evangelicals and Catholics to vote for trump, said:

In 2016, then-candidate Trump was running purely on his rhetorical statements and never held office, so there was no track record to point to. Some people thought that was smoke and mirrors and he was going to deviate from the stuff he was promising on the stump. But honestly, he has delivered. It’s been one thing after another.

As far as Catholics go, Head acknowledged that the Biden campaign has been more proactive than the Clinton campaign in targeting faith voters.

That is not saying a lot because literally, the Clinton campaign did not have one single staff member that was dedicated to the faith vote. There has at least been a nominal effort to try to reach out to the faith vote, particularly the Catholic vote. But it didn’t help when some Catholic bishops and priests have denied sacraments to Biden because of his stances on life and religious liberty. He is trying to make a better case at least than the Clinton campaign did, but it has yet to be seen how well that is going to be.