The Patriot Post® · Christian Conservatives Shatter Turnout Records for Trump
No one could have predicted the twists and turns of this election, but Donald Trump was certainly right about one thing: his deeply religious base was going to rewrite the record books. Back in January, talking to a group of evangelicals, he predicted that as high as their turnout was in 2016, Christian conservatives would “blow those numbers away in 2020.” And boy, did they.
Four years ago, researcher George Barna would be the first to tell you that he never thought he’d see a stronger statistic. SAGE Cons, those Americans he carefully segments out as spiritually-active, governance-engaged conservatives, nearly maxed out their turnouts at the polls. Ninety-one percent of them, driven by their dislike of Hillary Clinton, showed up to vote — shattering every record ever set. “We thought, ‘Well, we’re never going to see that again in our lifetimes,” George remembers. “You really can’t get much higher [turnout] than that.”
He was wrong — and couldn’t be happier about it. This election, these voters showed up in “staggering, mind-blowing” numbers. A whopping 99 percent of SAGE Cons turned out to vote. No one else, George explains, even came close.
They cast 23 million votes — that’s a third of the president’s total. And what makes that so impressive, Barna explained on “Washington Watch,” is that they only make up nine percent of the population! And yet, this nine percent of motivated Christians accounted for 14 percent of the vote! Talk about impact.
“It’s pretty astonishing,” he said in amazement. “When you look at, 'Where did [Trump] get his vote?’ ‘Where did he get his support from?’ This is — without a doubt, without any qualifications — the most enthusiastic and united group of votes he received from the 80 different segments of the population that we studied.” And that includes Democrats, Republicans, women, liberals, blacks, conservatives — no other voting bloc has rallied behind a candidate with so much solidarity. “I think we’re pretty much seeing the ceiling,” Barna marveled, “of what any particular voting segment could ever achieve.”
So what drove them in such high numbers to vote? When George surveyed them, he found that the biggest motivation was the track record of President Trump. “You have to remember back [in] 2016, the SAGE Cons who voted for him in huge numbers were essentially voting against Hillary Clinton. In 2020, they were voting for President Trump because of what he’s done over the last four years.” But, Barna pointed out, a close second was “his position on various social issues that matter to them, as well we his positions on several fiscal and economic issues.” Several of them told George, “I never thought that I would say that I appreciate Donald Trump’s leadership,” but after four years of it, that’s where a large proportion of them have landed.
Of course, none of this has made its way into the media’s analysis — in part, I’m sure, because they don’t want to admit how much political influence Christian conservatives have. It conflicts with their 40-year narrative that the religious right is a dying breed. And it also goes against their phony storyline that evangelicals turned against Trump in 2020 — an absurd myth that Barna’s research thoroughly debunks. Not only did Christian conservatives stick with Trump almost unanimously, they made up the strongest presidential support base in history!
Part of the problem, Barna explains, is how the media defines “evangelical.” “They don’t understand religion or care about religion. They just ask people, ‘Hey, do you consider yourself to be an evangelical or a born-again Christian? …[A]nd they lump those two groups together.” Almost 90 percent of the U.S. House call themselves “Christian,” but how many of their ideologies actually line up with what the Bible teaches? In politics, especially, there can be a big difference between how people define themselves and how they act. Joe Biden says he’s Catholic, but his actual agenda is stuffed full of the most radical anti-faith, anti-life, anti-family policies our country has ever seen. So if the press wants to make some grand declaration about a religious group like evangelicals, fine. But it would help if they were actually talking to the real ones!
Barna’s data drills much deeper. Instead of letting people label themselves, he studies what people believe spiritually and what they as a result of those beliefs. Because of that, he says, “Our research shows a very different outcome among evangelicals even than what you would hear from the mainstream media.” And even that’s different from the group he calls SAGE Cons.
SAGE Cons are unique because their worldview “compels them to be involved,” George says. “They believe that the Bible teaches if you’re going to represent Christ, you don’t pick and choose where you represent them. You represent him everywhere. So that means in your community, in the voting booths, in your schools, in your churches, in your place of work, no matter where you go, you represent Christ.” When it comes to voting, these people understand that “at some point, they’re going to stand before God and account for [these choices]… So, they’re one of the most politically attentive groups or segments in our population.”
To them, Barna says: don’t give up the fight. Engaging the culture around us is one of the most important things Christians can do. It’s also, as this election shows, one of the most impactful. So be encouraged. What you’re doing is making a difference — and it will continue to make a difference in the critical days ahead.
Originally published here.
The Ballot Battle of Gettysburg
Where are the real journalists? Certainly not in Pennsylvania, where one of the most jaw-dropping hearings in state history just took place. Most Americans haven’t heard a word about it, which is no great mystery since the media is doing everything it can to make the election results look squeaky clean. The reality, Paul Kengor warns, is anything but. And a 570,000 ballot dump is a major reason why.
The audience, Kengor points out, gasped when they heard it. In Gettysburg, where legislators were pouring over numbers and looking at all of the claims of voting manipulation, one particular bombshell took the room’s breath away. An expert, testifying to the Pennsylvania Senate, took to his chair and started talking about “spike anomalies,” or, certain points in the vote processing where a huge number of ballots are processed in “a time period that is not feasible or mechanically possible under the circumstances.”
Pulling out a chart, Ret. Col. Phil Waldren points to a 90-minute period on Election Day where 604,000 votes were counted in 90 minutes. But here’s the astonishing part: 570,000 of those votes were for Biden and 3,200 were for Trump. In other words, Kengor does the math, “Biden scooped up this enormous batch by 99.4 percent. Incredible. Impossible. Scandalous.” And he wasn’t the only one who thought so. The room was audibly shocked (1:28:00 of this video).
“If what Waldren alleges here is true,” Kengor argues, “then this would constitute one of the most insidious examples of documented voter fraud in the history of American presidential politics. This one spike alone would have erased Donald Trump’s 600,000-vote lead over Joe Biden late Tuesday night, November 3. Biden has reportedly won Pennsylvania by about 70,000 votes. This one swing would have done it. If this is true, then this episode alone might well constitute a smoking gun affirming a fraudulent election in Pennsylvania.” “And yet, he fumes, "this electoral bombshell has been completely ignored by the mainstream press.”
Another interesting piece of this, Kengor explained on “Washington Watch,” is that of the 3.1 million mail-in ballots were sent to Pennsylvania voters (these are updated figures from the secretary of state’s office), there was an extraordinarily high mail-in return rate. According to state election officials, almost 90 percent of voters sent in a completed ballot. That’s almost unheard of, Kengor says. And “what it would have taken for Joe Biden to [surpass] Donald Trump’s 700,000 vote lead in Pennsylvania seems statistically impossible.”
And, oddly enough, a majority of those late mail-in ballots only had Joe Biden’s name circled. “I don’t know how common that is to have only the president checked off and nobody else. But I find that too curious, especially given the opportunities for fraud, the lack of verification in the mail-in balloting process.”
The press, meanwhile, is completely MIA — even though these are legitimate issues that have the power to sway the election of the most powerful leader in the free world. “Trump’s critics,” Kengor understands, “will want to dismiss the hearings as a partisan spectacle hosted by Pennsylvania Republican legislators. You can’t do that. A real journalist would see enough here to at least merit making some phone calls or sending a few emails…” Look, he says, “whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you voted for him or not, this should concern every American. If this were Joe Biden being victimized, I would likewise protest. The media sure as heck would. This is not right.”
Originally published here.
Undercover Tapes: CNN Brakes the News to Hurt Trump
Most conservatives would love to be a fly on the wall of CNN’s internal morning call. Now, thanks to James O'Keefe’s latest sting operation, they can be! The Project Veritas founder spent two months listening into the network’s anti-Trump meetings. And what he heard is exactly what you’d expect from a pillar of the fake news community: liberal propaganda masquerading as journalism.
In tape after tape, executives like Jeff Zucker sound more like the Democratic Party’s hired guns than reporters. When the subject of Hunter Biden’s scandal comes up in October, there isn’t much debate about how to handle the damaging story. CNN won’t. Anchor Jake Tapper brings up the issue like he’s part of the Joe Biden debate prep team. “The right wing is going crazy with all sorts of allegations about Biden and his family. Too disgusting to repeat here… If Trump goes there, what should Biden do?” They consider that for a while and decide that regardless of what the candidate does, they’ll ignore the emails the New York Post breaks. “I don’t think that we should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the rightwing media suggests that we should,” Zucker barks.
Earlier that month, the CNN boss put special effort into making the president’s actions seem more “erratic” than usual. Don’t “normalize” his behavior, Zucker insisted. “He is all over the place” from the COVID “steroids,” the chief said, “and I think we need to lean into that.” If we’ve made any mistake about the president, he went on, it’s “that our banners have been too polite.”
After the election, the network’s misinformation machine kicked into high gear, taking every opportunity to legitimize Joe Biden’s suspicious come-from-behind win. “News organizations have to be very careful… about not giving Donald Trump too much of a platform on his not conceding,” they urged. Other calls urged the hosts to “go after Lindsey Graham, because he was helping to legitimize the Trump campaign’s fraud claims. The message couldn’t be clearer: ignore the election irregularities at all costs.
Finally, after weeks of listening in, O'Keefe unmuted himself. "Hey Jeff Zucker, are you there?” he asked. “Hey, this is James O'Keefe. We’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months, recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions if you have a minute. Do you still feel you’re the most trusted name in news, because I have to say from what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls, I don’t know about that. And we got a lot of recordings that indicate that you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”
Zucker thanked him for his “comments” and told his team to hang up while they set up a new system. New system or no new system, the damage to CNN’s credibility (what little there is) has already been done. James, who has more than enough material to draw out the pain, says he’ll be releasing new content every day like a Christmas “advent calendar.”
At the end of the day, none of this is all that shocking — especially not in a country where nine percent of people trusted the media to begin with. It does, however, confirm “a lot of suspicions,” James argued. “To see the president of a media conglomerate barking orders at his reporters and journalists, telling them what to cover, what not to cover. That’s not anything resembling journalism I know.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.