The Doug Election and America After the Great Dechurching

In a 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch Tom Hanks appeared as "Doug," a MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter on the gameshow Black Jeopardy. It's one of the best sketches SNL has done in the past decade. Over the course of five minutes, it becomes increasingly apparent that the white working class Doug and the show's regular Afro-American contestants actually have much more in common than is often acknowledged or realized. Or, at least, that is until the Final Jeopardy category comes up: "Lives That Matter."

The question to ask now, which wasn't apparent when the sketch aired eight years ago, was "what if the broad social progressivism of the late 2010s and early 2020s ever became discredited and failed due to a mixture of incompetence, a lack of seriousness, and deep corruption?"

November 5, 2024 answered that question for us. What we have now is essentially a vindication of Michael Lind's New Class War. The divide in this election was, stated in its most basic way, between a class of creatives and knowledge workers based in urban hubs who have high levels of education and... everyone else.

Let's review the tape, as it stands at time of writing on Wednesday afternoon:

Three of the most reliably blue states in the country shifted by around ten percentage points each toward the GOP. Counties that are over 25% Black shifted toward the right by 4.1 points. Counties over 25% Hispanic shifted 9.5 points. Arab-Americans in Dearborn, MI went for Trump and even amongst those who didn't go for Trump, many voted for Jill Stein rather than Vice President Harris. Trump won a North Carolina county that is 50% Afro-American, a county that Republicans had won only once in the over 150 years since Reconstruction. He won 45% of Hispanics and doubled his share of the Afro-American vote in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Two predominantly Hispanic counties in Pennsylvania have shifted toward the right by 20-30 points in the past eight years. Starr County, along the Texas-Mexico border, a 97% Hispanic county, has had a 76 point flip in just eight years, with Trump carrying the county this time.

In terms of Trump's electoral base, he cobbled together a coalition of working class whites, combined with a larger number of Hispanics (he had a majority of Hispanic men, in fact), Arab Americans, and Afro-Americans than any Republican has in a very long time. His electoral coalition also includes white evangelicals, dissident right tech optimists, MAGA porn stars, and probably several other groups that I'm forgetting.

What does it all mean?

Three things come to mind, though it is still early and we should be prudent and not jump to too many conclusions at this point—American voters are enormously fickle, after all.

That said, with all appropriate disclaimers, here is my list.

First, the shift is best understood as "anti-incumbent ideology."

This is a political moment with strong anti-incumbent bias that is broadly indifferent to party. In the UK the right-wing Tories were routed by left-wing Labour. Argentina saw a right-wing libertarian triumph over the nation's incumbent left wing. Brazil elected a left winger to replace their right-wing government in 2022. Canada is likely set to elect a conservative government when it has elections within the next 12 months. The general pattern of our political moment is not movement to the right or the left but rather a pattern of anti-incumbency.

Even so, it's important to understand the ways the Democrats took an already hard-to-win election for the incumbent party and made it even harder. First, after the successful 2022 midterms the party could have moved to push Biden toward being a one-term president with the assertiveness that they finally did bring to bear late in the 2024 cycle.

That would have led to a genuinely open primary and the possibility of a stronger candidate whose platform might have somewhat lightened the incumbency drag on the ticket. They didn't do that. Instead, thy leaned into that incumbency, even as there were ample signs in popular culture that the defining posture and style of the Democratic party was not popular and was, actually, alienating to many voters. (And there were plenty of people even in mainstream outlets raising questions about Biden's age and fitness for office throughout 2022.)

Second, when Biden finally did step aside, they were left with a less talented version of Hillary Clinton—a machine politician who doesn't seem to have any convictions of her own and who would represent the same wing of the party as Clinton and therefore have the same vulnerabilities as Clinton.

Third, by tacking toward the center without actually presenting any real policy vision of any kind, Harris positioned herself as a typical Clinton-style neo-liberal, at best. But neo-liberalism as a policy vision is hideously unpopular at this point in American life. Then, as if that wasn't a large enough hurdle to overcome, the Harris campaign decided to close by associating themselves with the Cheney family, thereby making the Harris campaign a symbolic container for both neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, which somehow is even less popular than neo-liberalism. (There is, perhaps, something symbolically notable in the fact that Trump beat a Bush in his first primary campaign, beat a Clinton in his first general election triumph, and beat someone closely associated with the Cheneys in his second general election triumph.)

The effect of all this is that Americans were basically given a chance to, with a single vote, signal their disdain for everything about mainstream American politics in the past 35 years, repudiating both Clintonism and neo-conservatism in one act. And they did.

Significantly, none of the above means that the majority of Americans or even all of Trump's voters actually like Trump. Exit polls suggest his favorability is still underwater.

What happened is a significant number of people who do not view Trump favorably still opted to vote for him because of the degree of their distaste for what the Harris campaign represented, which was the incumbent party and, in particular, an incumbent party with some uniquely unpopular beliefs and goals.

In other words, a very weird and probably not sustainable coalition of understandably frustrated voters, united mostly by their distaste for post-Cold War managerialism, coalesced to repudiate what they perceive to be the establishment, a move which was encouraged by the decisions of the Harris campaign.

Second, it is not clear who will steer the second Trump administration.

Inherent in having a very weird electoral coalition is much uncertainty about who will actually provide the intellectual and power base for a second Trump administration. Some expect to see the GOP genuinely become a multiracial populist party, though I am not in their number, at least not until I see some actually implemented policies that support that vision. To this date Trump's only legislative accomplishment of note is something that literally any Republican president would have done.

Others, with whom I am more sympathetic, expect a California tech-optimist administration defined by the vision of figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen as well as media figures broadly aligned with that dissident technophile space, such as Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan.

Still others have expected the Claremont and Heritage space to dominate the administration, though that seems less likely after they overplayed their hand regarding Project 2025 and seem to have alienated Trump, who hates both being upstaged and being managed.

What is interesting about this is that the two most likely dominant influences—the multiracial populist influence and the California tech-optimist influence—are not going to be particularly friendly to the traditional concerns of conservative Christians. Indeed, there is little reason to expect evangelicals to have significant sway over this Trump administration. Broadly speaking, we are now on the far side of the Great Dechurching, an era which saw 40 million Americans stop going to church, 13 million of whom were evangelicals. So if your numbers shrink by a volume of voters equivalent to the combined populations of the Houston and Washington DC metros in only 25 years... that is going to translate to far less power simply by nature of how democracy works.

Moreover, the Christians most closely aligned with Trump hold to views that will alienate them from other key Trump constituencies. A movement calling to deport naturalized citizens who came after 1965 for political reasons is never going to fly with a campaign that just won largely because of its growing support from precisely those immigrant groups and that seems to be quite happy about the fact. A movement whose media face makes racist, derogatory comments about Indian-American immigrants in California will likely struggle to establish itself with an administration whose vice president is married to an Indian-American immigrant from California. A movement calling for repealing the 19th amendment is not going to get a hearing with an administration that won partly because it actually won a majority of white women voters. A movement that wants to ban IVF is going to be dead on arrival with an administration closely tied to technophiles obsessed with human excellence, all of whom love IVF (for deeply eugenic reasons).

This is the broader point: There were two theories about evangelical voters in this election. One theory said that if we abstained or voted third party we were taking ourselves out of the game and making ourselves irrelevant. But that has it all wrong. If evangelicals simply gave their votes away even after Trump purged life issues from the platform and offered them literally nothing except the fact that he isn't a Democrat and they all went for him anyway that only makes them the cheapest date in politics.

Why should he, or any other Republican, listen to the demands of evangelical voters if they know they'll get those votes no matter what and if by ignoring those demands they can expand their appeal into voter blocs they otherwise might not reach?

The other theory, of course, is that if you want a voice in politics you should actually make politicians earn your support instead of giving it away for nothing. After all, evangelicals can participate in civic life in a thousand ways regardless of how they vote. But when it comes to voting they should ask politicians to earn their support. This, I think, would have been the correct approach.

This is what politics in America are likely to be after the Great Dechurching.

What we have, then, is an election in which the electoral coalitions were completely scrambled, and white evangelicals rendered mostly irrelevant. For the moment it would seem our politics are a struggle between the barstool right and the managerial left, neither of which are easily reconciled to Christianity.

So what comes next for American Protestants?

I suspect there are three dominant theo-political tribes within evangelicalism at the moment:

First, there is the firmly Trump-aligned evangelicals who are essentially the evangelical version of The Daily Wire.

Second, there is the vociferously Never Trump bloc of evangelicals, which is basically the evangelical version of The Bulwark.

Both these groups have the same problem: There isn't actually a need for "Evangelical Daily Wire" both because The Daily Wire already exists and because there is nothing added to The Daily Wire by supplementing it with evangelicalism. The same applies to The Bulwark, even if in slightly more complex ways. (Take it away, Hank Hill.)

That brings me to what I think the third bloc of evangelicals is: a group that voted in a broad variety of ways, but isn't particularly obsessed with politics because they're busy volunteering around their community, helping out in the nursery at church, and taking care of their families. They're not interested in revolutionary political ideologies of any type, but neither are they triggered when a friend expresses a political opinion they disagree with. They care about politics, but it isn't what moves or excites them most. What excites them are the things that have always excited God's people—hearing the Gospel preached, seeing people repent and enter into the church and grow in grace, seeing new ministries and works established, and finding ways of putting their skills and ambitions to work in service to God and neighbor.

What exists before us now is a very strange but also potentially quite exciting evangelistic moment: Many of our friends and neighbors are weary of late modernity, which is increasingly unlivable. They are open to ideas and choices they weren't ten years ago. (Even amongst those who have left the church, many need little more than an invitation to get them to come back.)

One product of all this angst and anxiety and social isolation is the emergence of political religions. If we allow ourselves to get sucked into that, then we don't actually have anything to offer our neighbors because we will be no different. We will simply be defined by the same anger and anxiety as them.

On the other hand, if we can be communally engaged, not easily triggered by the choices and beliefs of neighbors, and genuinely present ourselves as a place of welcome and hospitality, then I think the potential in our moment is quite exciting.

As Our Lord reminds us, the harvest is plentiful. May we be fit to serve as his workers in it.