Claire Marie Kuhn

Professor Geoff Layman

American Public Opinion and Voting Behavior

April 12, 2018

Research Paper Preview

For my research paper, I settled on the general topic of religion and how it affected the

2016 election. In particular, I am very interested in the rise of the religious “nones” and how they

might affect the future political landscape. To learn how they might shape the future, it is key to

understand how they vote. My initial hypothesis is that individuals who affiliate with no

religious tradition should be more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton than those who identify with

a religious tradition. No religion is a nominal variable, and it will be my independent variable

with the election results being my dependent variable. I am looking for a positive relationship

between no religious affiliation and voting for Hillary Clinton, as well as a statistically

significant relationship between the two variables.

My first explanatory hypothesis behind my primary hypothesis is that non-religiously

affiliated people are more likely to be pro-choice, and thus less likely to be pro-life. While

Donald Trump personally might not be truly pro-life, he ran a conservative campaign with the

Republican Party’s support. This meant that he embraced their pro-life, anti-abortion platform

and ran with plans to elect judges and enforce public policy in favor of those ideals. If non-

religious people believe in abortion as a women’s right to choose, they will not support him in

this and will instead for Hillary Clinton, who embraces the pro-choice movement. Religious

traditions generally have some framework for how one addresses beginning and end of life

issues. If a person has no religious affiliation, they will not have that religious framework and
will generally go by their own moral compass and/or logic. I believe this leads more people with

no religious tradition be pro-choice than pro-life, and thus more non religious people to vote for

Hillary Clinton.

My second explanatory hypothesis behind the initial hypothesis that those who are not

affiliated with a religious tradition is that “nones” are more likely to be in the younger

generations, like the millennials, than older. I believe that older people are more likely to vote for

Republicans and younger people are more likely to vote for Democrats. This is a very understood

phenomena in political statistics. Religious institutions are losing young people, especially

millennials, which is resulting in swathes of young people with no religious affiliation. I believe

young people are more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton, thus those you have no religious

affiliation are more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Young people are more likely to vote for

Hillary Clinton because she supports issues that resonate with the younger generations, such as

LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s rights as well. Her ability to connect with young people,

following in the stead of Obama’s incredible ability to do so, continued the tradition of more

young people voting for her over Donald Trump. Another explanation behind the hypothesis is

that Donald Trump was not as dedicated in pulling in the young millennial vote, whereas Hillary

knew it would be key for her success. For these reasons, I believe that non-religiously affiliated

people would be more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton since they are more likely to be young.

The results of my test of my primary hypothesis were what I had hoped and expected

them to be. Out of religiously non-affiliated people, 70.12% voted for Hillary Clinton, while

29.88% voted for Trump. There was a positive relationship between having no religion and

voting for Clinton. The chi-sqaure was 0.000, which means there is definitely a statistically

significant relationship between religious traditions and voting patterns in the presidential
election. Another part I noted was that there were 579 observations of religious “nones”, which

is the largest categorical amount of religious traditions observed. This larger sample size helps

me to feel even more confident in the results of my primary test of my hypothesis, as that means

there is less error.

Table 1: The Relationship between Religious Traditions and the 2016 Two-Party Presidential
Vote

Religious Tradition

Presidential Mainline Black Other

Vote Evangelic Protestant Protestant Catholic Jewish None Religion

Clinton (D) 20.66% 43.24% 91.49% 51.73% 80% 70.12% 72.29%

Trump (R) 79.34% 56.76% 8.51% 48.27% 20.00% 29.88% 27.71%

(Number of
(518) (481) (188) (549) (60) (579) (83)
observations)

Chi-square = 444.9753
(df=6)
p = 0.000

Source: 2016 American National Election Study