Appendices: The Sources of MAGA Madness and Congressional Kakistocracy

Additional methodology, data, and context.

Below are the appendices for my post “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness and Congressional Kakistocracy.”

Appendix I: How the Politicization of WCN Is Measured in This Post

How can we quantify the influence of white Christian nationalism on Republican voters and/or elected officials? While there is no data source to tell us precisely how many white Christian nationalist sympathizers there are in every congressional district, the density of Evangelicals is a close approximation, and a metric for which there is extensive data. The most Evangelical districts are most likely to have influential churches and WCN religious leaders, as well as a more substantial portion of voters who attend church regularly and hear WCN messages from those leaders. That, in turn, feeds a local “groupthink.” Thus, the densest Evangelical districts are a proxy for the districts in which the organized WCN interests have the most sway over who gets on the ballot and who goes to Washington.

As regular readers know, I’m highly critical of efforts to explain our politics using demographic labels like “non-college voters.” I want to emphasize that there are crucial differences between “Evangelicals” and most other demographic labels.¹ Evangelical Christianity is not only a core identity for many of its adherents and their communities; Evangelical churches have also, for decades, functioned as some of the Republican Party’s most effective political mobilizers. By contrast, non-college voters are not an organized political constituency. Few would consider “didn’t go to college” the most important thing about themselves, and we don’t see weekly community meetings or bake sales for “non-college Americans.”

Appendix II: Latino Evangelicals

In “Confirmation Bias Is a Hell of a Drug” and elsewhere, I’ve gone to great lengths to show that religious affiliation, more than any other variable, including educational attainment, is the most salient dividing line for white voters. According to the Pew validated voter study, in 2022, the white Evangelical gap was 80 points (D+6 vs R+74) while the white educational gap was 39 points (D+5 vs R+34). 

But it would surprise most people to know that Evangelical affiliation is just as much a divider for Latino voters as it is for white voters. And when pundits scold Democrats for losing Latino voters, they never include this context.  

Thanks to Equis, which does some of the most comprehensive and rigorous polling of Latino voters, a clear picture emerges. In 2020 and 2022, the Latino Evangelical vote gap was about 60 points Republican and the Latino educational gap was less than 10 points for Democrats among college-educated voters. Indeed, Latino Evangelicals voted for Republicans by as great a margin as white non-college voters did. And of the eight House Republicans representing majority-Latino districts, four represent districts with above the median Evangelical density. The following graphs show this for the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 House midterms. 

In Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream, Tony Tian-Ren Lin writes, “These churches are powerful institutions with significant economic and political influence in the towns and cities they call home.²”

Appendix III: WCN Districts Dominate the Republican Party

Here’s Chart #2 again; the tables below have more detail about the numbers that went into it. 

The chart above actually understates somewhat the dominance of Evangelicals in the Republican House Caucus. The few blue bars on the right side of the median are mostly southern majority-minority districts, where Republicans rarely win a general election. 

The following table excludes the majority minority districts and shows that Republicans represent 93 percent of the most Evangelical districts and 78 percent of second quintile Evangelical districts. These two categories elected 67 percent of the Republican Caucus. Meanwhile, Republicans lose nearly three-quarters of the remaining districts (gray shading).

But, even this understates the grip Christian nationalism has. Of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 390 are not significantly competitive between Democrats and Republicans, and 201 of those districts are drawn to heavily favor Republicans.³ That means that for those 201 Republican representatives – who make up 91 percent of the Republican Caucus today – their only potential challenge would be in a Republican primary. (Enter the WCN Primary Hack.)  

Here is the same chart as above, but only for those 390 uncompetitive seats. This is a more important frame, as it reflects the foundation of the congressional parties. Now we can see that Republicans represent 98(!) percent of the most Evangelical safe districts and 82 percent of the remaining Above Median Evangelical safe districts. These two categories elected just shy of three-quarters of the Republican Caucus in safe districts. Again, Republicans lose three-quarters of the remaining districts.  

Appendix IV: WCN Is Driving Election Denial and MAGA Extremism

Election Denial

The next graph corresponds to the “Evangelical Density” graph at the beginning of the piece, except it’s just for Republican House members. The quintile markers correspond to quintiles of the entire House, thus creating a visualization of the very large share the Evangelical districts constitute of the caucus. 

The red bars reflect Republicans who either voted against the Electoral College on January 6th, or if they are freshmen, were election deniers according to the FiveThirtyEight and Washington Post databases. The gray bars are those Republicans who either accepted the electoral votes or are freshmen who are not on record disputing the 2020 election outcome. 

More than three quarters of those representing the most Evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three quarters of the deniers in the Caucus hail from Evangelical districts. 

Ideological Caucus Membership

Now, let’s look at how the representatives themselves place themselves on the ideological spectrum through their caucus membership, per this excellent Washington Post piece. We will focus on the furthest right Freedom Caucus and consolidate three self-consciously moderate caucuses (Problem Solvers, Main Street and Governance). Red bars represent members of the Freedom Caucus, and gray bars represent members of one of the three so-called “moderate” caucuses. (Blank spaces represent Republicans who do not belong to one of those four caucuses.) 

Of those Republicans who have joined a caucus, those with above-median Evangelical density are twice as likely to have joined the Freedom Caucus as the others, while those with below-median Evangelical density are three times as likely to have joined one of the other caucuses. Thus, three quarters of Freedom Caucus members are from above-median Evangelical density districts, while two-thirds of the members of the other caucuses are from below-median Evangelical districts. 

For more on how the Christian nationalist movement contributed to the overall congressional realignment along sectional lines, see “Congressional ‘Class Inversion’ or Sectional Reversion?”

Appendix V: Further Reading on White Christian Nationalism 

“Christian nationalism is not a religious creed but, in my view, a political ideology,” writes Katherine Stewart in The Power Worshippers: 

It promotes the myth that the American republic was founded as a Christian nation. It asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but on adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage. It demands that our laws be based not on the reasoned deliberation of our democratic institutions but on particular, idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible. Its defining fear is that the nation has strayed from the truths that once made it great. Christian nationalism looks backward on a fictionalized history of America’s allegedly Christian founding. It looks forward to a future in which its versions of the Christian religion and its adherents, along with their political allies, enjoy positions of exceptional privilege and power in government and in law. … It does not merely reflect the religious identity it pretends to defend but actively works to construct and promote new varieties of religion for the sake of accumulating power. 

For more on the political activities white Christian nationalism, see, for example: 

• Stewart, Katherine - The Power Worshippers

• Nelson, Ann - The Shadow Network

• Linker, Damon - The Theocons

• Butler, Anthea - White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

• Whitehead, Andrew and Perry, Samuel - Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States

• Howe, Ben - The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values

• Gorski, Phillip and Perry, Samuel - The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy

• Lin, Tony Tian-Ren - Prosperity Gospel: Latinos and their American Dream

• Sharlett, Jeff - The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power 

For more on the connections between political Christianity and the Tea Party Movement and post-2008 politics, see, for example: 

• Blum, Rachel - How the Tea Party Captured the GOP

• Parker, Christopher and Barreto, Matt - Change They Can’t Believe in: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America

• Skocpol, Theda and WIlliamson, Vanessa - The Tea Party and the Making of Republican Conservatism

• Brody, David: The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of the Evangelical and the Tea Party and Taking Back America;

For more on the connections between Christian nationalism and corporations as well as the formation of the alliance, see, for example: 

• Phillips, Kevin - The Emerging Republican Majority; American Theocracy 

• Kruse, Kevin - One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

• Dochuck, Darren - Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crute Made Modern 

• Maxwell, Angie - The Long Southern Strategy

For more on the origins of the religious alignment with the Republican Party, especially the politics of abortion, see, for example: 

• Ziegler, Mary - Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment; 

• Balmer, Randall - Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

For more on the long arc and connections between white Christian nationalism and politics, see, for example: 

• Jones, Robert - The End of White Christian America and White Too Long

• Schlozman, Daniel - When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History

• Schlozman, Kay Lehman - The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy; 

• Hollinger, David - Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society Became More Secular

1.  The only other demographic category with similar explanatory power regarding partisanship is Black voters, who consistently break about 90-10 for Democrats.

2.  Lin, Tony Tian-Ren. Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream (Where Religion Lives) (pp. 7-8). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

3.  This is based on Cook ratings consolidated solid and likely Democratic or Republican. At this time all 390 districts are held by the “correct” party.