Editors’ note: This is part 17 of The Christian Post’s year-long articles series “Politics in the Pews: Evangelical Christian engagement in elections from the Moral Majority to today.” In this series, we will look at issues pertaining to election integrity and new ways of getting out the vote. We’ll also look at issues Evangelicals say matter most to them ahead of the presidential election and the political engagement of diverse groups, politically and ethnically. Read other articles in the series by clicking here.
One of the nation’s leading Christian conservative grassroots advocacy organizations aims to raise over $60 million to mobilize the Christian vote ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with canvassers already reaching over 3 million potential voters in battleground states.
Leaders with the Faith and Freedom Coalition provided an update on their organization’s efforts ahead of the 2024 presidential election during a recent press call with reporters, saying it hopes to raise more money than it has ever raised in an election cycle and engage more voters.
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Founded in 2009 by longtime Christian activist Ralph Reed to be a voice and mobilize the Evangelical vote, the organization defines its mission as “educating, equipping, and mobilizing people of faith and like-minded individuals to be effective citizens,” with a specific focus on getting religious Americans to “vote and flex their political muscles.”
Specifically, the advocacy organization says its goal is to raise $62 million, an increase from the $50 million spent in 2020. The group stresses that it is still working to secure the funding needed to meet this objective.
“We are seeing unprecedented enthusiasm and intensity among our volunteers and the voters of faith with whom they are interacting,” Reed said in a statement published this week. “It is greater than we saw in 2016 or 2020. These voters are coming, and they are coming in historic numbers. That is more important than polls that replicate voter turnout numbers from past elections that may or may not apply in 2024.”
Faith and Freedom Coalition plans to reach 1 million homes weekly in the battleground states and send out 25 million get-out-the-vote texts.
The organization told reporters that it conducted 3 million home visits leading up to the election, with a goal of visiting 10 million homes by Election Day. The expected 10 million home visits marks a rise from the 8.6 million conducted in 2022 and the nearly 6 million in 2020.
The home visits have the potential to reach 17 to 18 million people, as some households have multiple voters living in them. Characterizing the voter outreach as a “massive undertaking,” the organization’s leaders believe it will make a difference.
To accomplish the home visits and other get-out-the-vote efforts, the Faith and Freedom Coalition plans to hire 5,000 paid staffers and 5,000 volunteers to conduct such outreach in the battleground states.
Their efforts focus on 7.2 million voters in the battleground states, predicting that these individuals could impact the presidential election.
“This election is effectively tied in every battleground state, and this kind of voter education and turnout operation could be the difference,” Reed said. “The premature reports of the inadequacy of the conservative ground game in 2024 are greatly exaggerated.”
Much of the press call focused on the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s outreach in its home state of Georgia, one of the hotly contested battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election.
Leaders noted that the organization currently has 141 paid staff and over 600 volunteers in the state. As of last week, Faith and Freedom Coalition had knocked on 282,256 doors in the state.
Remarking that “people of faith are united” ahead of the 2024 election, Faith and Freedom Coalition leaders discussed how the network of Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is working on behalf of Trump despite the differences the two men have had since the 2020 presidential election.
Kemp won re-election by 7.5 percentage points in 2022, two years after Trump narrowly lost the state by 0.3 percentage points.
Faith and Freedom Coalition also distributes voter guides to churches, attempting to inform people of faith about the issues at stake in the election. As the organization’s website outlined, Faith and Freedom Coalition’s voter outreach efforts include “handing out 30 million pieces of literature across 125,000 churches, including many in the battleground states.”
“Key to the 2024 effort is turning out 1 million recently registered Evangelical voters, as well as 7.8 million Evangelicals whom Faith & Freedom Coalition has identified as low-propensity voters,” the website added.
Previous presidential election results have demonstrated that Republican victories depend on candidates receiving strong support from the Evangelical community and voters of faith as a whole.
In 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump, exit polls show that white Evangelical voters, also known as born-again Christians, constituted 28% of the electorate, and 76% of them backed Trump. By contrast, exit polls show that when Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, he secured 80% of the Evangelical vote. Despite giving Trump a higher vote share in 2016, Evangelicals comprised a smaller part of the electorate that year (26%).
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
