God’s country: perceptions of religious and place-based candidate identities

Abstract It is often assumed that the rural identity is linked to the Republican Party and the urban identity to the Democratic Party, but little scholarship has investigated how voters connect thiese identities to the parties in an electoral context and how that perception may influence their electoral preferences. Furthermore, recent elections have seen various political elites employ rural and Evangelical Christian identity labels in virtually synonymous ways in their association with the Republican Party. But are these partisan stereotypes really how Americans perceive these candidate identities? Utilizing a novel survey experiment, we find important distinctions between religious and place-based candidate cues. Our results show the enduring power of religion in partisan politics and suggest America’s urban-rural divide may be asymmetric in the minds of voters. These findings are subsequently meaningful for the study of religion’s place in America’s growing array of politicized social identities.