Nearly 3 in 10 Americans now claim no religious affiliation, making the "nones" the single largest religious cohort in the country. Yet this explosive growth has created an unexpected headache for campaigns: these voters are scattered, skeptical of traditional messaging, and wildly expensive to reach.
The math is brutal. Campaigns spent roughly $1.40 per nonreligious voter in 2024, compared to just 45 cents for religiously affiliated voters, according to Sisto Abeyta, a Democratic consultant at the Nevada firm TriStrategies. The difference reflects a fundamental shift in how politicians must operate.
Religious voters come with built-in infrastructure. "All I have to do is send a mailer and say I believe in God and apple pie," Abeyta explained. Church networks, denominational mailing lists, and faith-based community centers provide cheap, efficient channels to reach these voters. Nonreligious voters have no equivalent infrastructure. They cannot be efficiently organized through existing institutions because they have consciously rejected those institutions.
The unaffiliated demographic is also geographically fragmented. They cluster in secular regions like Seattle, Portland, and parts of New England, but exist everywhere else too, often isolated from one another. Without the geographic concentration that churches provide, campaigns must deploy expensive digital advertising, door-to-door canvassing, and targeted persuasion efforts to find and mobilize them.
The numbers reveal why politicians cannot ignore this shift. Pew Research shows that 29% of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, surpassing Catholics at 19% and evangelical Protestants at 23%. Among Gen Z, the figure jumps to 40%. About one-third of Democrats and independents identify as nonreligious, compared to just 13% of Republicans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
Complicating the picture: not all "nones" are equal voters. The broader unaffiliated group votes at lower rates than religious Americans when controlling for age and education. But atheists and agnostics, a more politically engaged subset, turn out roughly 30% more often than average religious voters. This means campaigns cannot simply write off the unaffiliated as low-priority targets.
What works is surprisingly straightforward. Steven Emmert, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, noted that when candidates simply acknowledge people of no faith, "that spreads like wildfire." Secular voters respond quickly and enthusiastically when politicians treat their absence of belief as legitimate. The problem is that most campaigns fail to make this basic gesture, leaving organized secular voters feeling dismissed.
The deeper shift reshaping campaign economics involves the decline of traditional civic institutions altogether. Churches, labor unions, and community organizations once provided cheap networks for political mobilization. As membership in these institutions collapses, campaigns face mounting pressure to buy attention through expensive digital channels and paid outreach. Democracy increasingly becomes a pay-to-play model where only well-funded candidates can afford to reach disconnected voters.
Colorado offers a concrete example. The state's large unaffiliated population has pushed campaigns away from faith-based appeals toward issue-focused messaging on abortion, climate, and housing. This shift reflects a new political reality: where churches once anchored campaigns, data-driven digital strategies now dominate.
Author James Rodriguez: "The 'nones' represent a genuine realignment in American politics that campaigns are struggling to understand, let alone afford. This gap between who voters are and how campaigns reach them will only widen."
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