Move over, evangelicals: Mainline Christians are the 2026 swing voter

For decades, election coverage has treated white evangelical Christians as the religious constituency that counts. With less than two months remaining till election day, another group deserves much closer attention: mainline Protestants.

The signs are beginning to appear in some unlikely places.

In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico (D), a Presbyterian seminarian, is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton (D), pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, is running for Senate in a state that has not elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century.

They are not alone. Over a dozen pastors , seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year, with several winning their party’s nomination. Their faith is not window dressing. They speak about loving our neighbors, human dignity, economic fairness, pluralism and the dangers of using political power to impose one version of Christianity on everyone else.

The reaction from some conservatives has been revealing. Republican opponents have questioned whether several of these candidates are even real Christians or real pastors. One coined the term “ Pastors in Name Only .”

If faith-forward Democratic candidates are so politically irrelevant, why work so hard to discredit their faith?

The signs are also appearing in churches. This summer, the General Assembly of my denomination, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., voted overwhelmingly to declare white Christian nationalism a “ theological error ” incompatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ.

In February, more than 2,000 people of faith joined a United Methodist-led worship service and a march around the U.S. Capitol in solidarity with immigrants. In Minnesota, at the height of the Trump administration’s deportation actions, Anoka United Church of Christ became a hub for neighbors providing groceries and supplies to immigrant families during the federal immigration surge. People who had never worshiped there began showing up to help.

Before his January 2025 inauguration, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde stood before President Trump and asked him, in the name of God, for mercy . Later that year, outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Chicago, Presbyterian Pastor David Black was struck in the head with a pepper ball while quoting Jesus’s scripture .

These stories and so much more point to a revival of the mainline Church happening across our nation. White mainline Protestants make up about 13 percent of Americans , roughly the same share as white evangelical Protestants. They are hardly reliable Democratic voters. Fifty-nine percent reported voting for Trump in 2024.

But look at what has happened since. By May of this year, white mainline Protestants were evenly divided between seeing Trump as a strong leader who should be given the power he needs and seeing him as a potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited. Their favorable views of his handling of immigration fell from 64 percent in March 2025 to 51 percent this May. Those are the numbers of a movable constituency.

The question this election season is not whether mainline pastors can persuade conservative evangelicals to become liberals, or whether pastors running on the Democratic ticket can win over voters who disagree with them on abortion or other cultural issues. That sets the bar in the wrong place.

Millions of Christians already belong to traditions that teach them to welcome the stranger, protect the vulnerable, distrust idolatrous political power and affirm the dignity of people across lines of difference. The more interesting question is what happens when those Christians hear their own tradition speaking clearly again.

I am a Presbyterian minister. I have spent most of my adult life organizing people of faith around poverty, racism, war, immigration and democracy. Mainline membership decline is real. But decline has too often been confused with irrelevance. A church can become smaller and recover its voice.

We are seeing that in Springfield, Ohio, where people of faith are organizing in defense of their neighbors . Churches are arranging caregivers for Haitian children whose parents fear detention, delivering food to families afraid to leave their homes and helping parents prepare legal documents. Faith leaders have accompanied Haitians to ICE appointments and served communion outside an ICE office. This is Christianity practicing neighbor-love in public.

Mainline Protestants will not vote as a bloc in November. They never have. Their political independence may be precisely what makes them interesting. For years, politicians and pundits have competed for religious voters largely by asking who can win the allegiance of conservative Christians.

This fall, keep an eye on the Christians everyone assumed had already made up their minds.

Jennifer Butler is an ordained Presbyterian minister, pastor and founder and CEO of Faith in Democracy. She is the author of “Who Stole My Bible? Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny” and “Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized. “