Poll: Democrats’ Empathy Schtick Isn’t Fooling Voters Anymore 

The most consequential shift in public opinion away from the Democrat Party ever is underway, and their obsession with MS-13 deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s plight won’t help. After decades of double-digit advantages over Republicans when asked which party “cares more for the needs of people like you,” Americans now have the two major parties tied. CNN’s senior data analyst, Harry Egnet, assessed the swing as one of “the most shocking pieces of poll data that I truthfully have seen this year, maybe in any prior year.”

Meanwhile, Patty Morin, the mother of murdered Maryland woman Rachel Morin, decried her senator, Chris Van Hollen, after his trip to El Salvador in pursuit of “due process” for illegal alien Garcia. Hollen never contacted Morin in the wake of her daughter’s murder at the hands of MS-13. Van Hollen and other vocal Democrats reflexively cast their concerns about Garcia’s deportation as acts of caring for the due process of all Americans, but the new polling suggests that the days of default crediting of Democrats with sincere compassion may be over.

For four years, the Democrat Party’s compassion has come with the burning of a police station justified as an “act of pure righteousness,” men in women’s locker rooms and competing against women in sports, borders open to drugs, child trafficking and violent gangs, sanctuary cities and states where elected Democrats work to thwart law enforcement efforts to catch and detain criminals; George Soros-funded district attorneys loathe to detain, much less to try offenders in courts of law. President Biden declared that “transgender discrimination is the civil rights issue of our time,” as parent-uninformed, teacher-facilitated sex change surgery is encouraged for freshly identified transgender children.

The words “caring” and “Democrat” no longer land as synonyms for at least half of the nation. And now Democrat lawmakers are rallying around an illegal gang member. If the new polling holds up, it will mark the surrender of the most potent and enduring advantage any political party has ever enjoyed in America.

The conviction that Democrats are more caring reaches beyond the 1994 polling in which the question was first asked back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and has placed a permanent hurdle before every GOP candidate for the White House ever since. George W. Bush’s attempt to compete on the caring front with his “compassionate conservatism” failed to move the numbers. From FDR’s Fireside Chats to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to Bill Clinton’s feeling Americans’ pain and beyond, the Democrats have owned concern for ordinary people.

The tectonic shift in perception evidenced by the new polling undermines the default crediting of caring by evangelical elites who’ve worked overtime for the last decade to sanctify Christian votes for Democrats, even as their erstwhile followers repeatedly voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Democrats Russell Moore and the late Timothy Keller not only suggested that evangelical support for Trump smacked of idolatry, they insisted that love of neighbor required vaccination and masking up during Covid and the welcoming of illegal immigrants at whatever numbers, come what may. For Keller, people concerned about the poor, as was Jesus, vote Democrat.   

As British historian Tom Holland demonstrates, the West remains deeply shaped by Christian sensibilities. Surprise that both supporters and opposers of slavery defended their views with the Bible misses the point. Both sides’ reaching for the scriptures demonstrates the unique hold of Christianity on the entire Western world. Church goers or not, America’s resonance with the Biblical assertion that “God is love” shows up in the voting booth with decisive effects.

As Joseph Epstein learned from Shelby Steele, “[Democrats] have, or at least feel they have, cornered the market on virtue. To put the liberal story in two words: They care.” If that perception in the American electorate has now been squandered by the Democrat Party, the GOP faces an entirely different political landscape ripe with new opportunities.

But in order to capitalize on the new possibilities before them, Republicans will have to do what the Democrats never fail to and that they rarely even attempt — namely, to make moral arguments for the policies they advance. For decades, while the Democrats have repeatedly wrapped themselves in the blanket of caring, compassion, and, in short, Christian love, the GOP has settled for touting national security, low taxes, libertarian social policies, and fake support for pro-life issues. That formula allowed the capture of the White House when Democrat failures outstripped its continued hold on “caring” in the American psyche.

But now it seems that the Democrat Party is seen as anti-Christian and cares mainly for non-citizens, criminals included. The new GOP emphasis on common sense is shrewd but falls short of the bold seizing of the moral high ground Democrats have achieved for almost nine decades. Trump’s prolife victories, aggressive opposition to DEI, and recent initiative to fight anti-Christian bias make the taking of that long-held moral political turf of caring possible — but Republicans will have to dial back their libertarian instincts a bit to get it done. 

Mark DeVine teaches historical theology at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, in Birmingham, Alabama and serves as Teaching Elder at Smoke Rise Baptist Church in Smoke Rise, Alabama. He formerly served as a missionary in Bangkok, Thailand. He is the author of “Bonhoeffer Speaks Today” and “Shalom Yesterday, Today, and Forever.”