Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez recently argued on her Substack that Democrats chasing religious voters are missing the point entirely. She’s right, and the reasons go deeper than most people realize.
Christian nationalism isn’t really about Christianity at all. At its root, it’s about tribe: white, native-born, conservative Protestant identity under siege. The scholars who study it (people like Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry) are clear: this isn’t a theological movement you can talk or preach someone out of. It’s loyalty to a group defined by race, grievance, and the feeling that their way of life is being erased. Social science has shown for decades that when a group feels attacked, waving their symbols back at them doesn’t convert anyone. It just feels like invasion. They dig in harder.
That’s why the old Democratic playbook of trying to out-Jesus the right in places like Texas keeps failing. The consultants are still chasing an older, whiter, more church-going version of the state that is literally shrinking every year. Meanwhile the actual Texas, younger, browner, more urban, more secular, is being ignored. Religiosity is dropping fast nationwide, especially among the generations driving Texas’s growth. One in four Texans is under 18. The future isn’t waiting for a moderate white candidate to sound more pious.
And here’s the tell: if Republicans truly owned Texas the way the maps pretend, they wouldn’t have had to redraw congressional districts mid-decade in 2025, surgically cracking Latino and Black neighborhoods and packing them into as few seats as possible. You only gerrymander that aggressively when you’re terrified the real electorate is slipping away. Real Texas, majority nonwhite, increasingly independent, tired of a rigged system, doesn’t need pandering. It needs policies that treat its existence as fact, not a problem to be diluted. The GOP knows exactly who that Texas is. That’s why they keep changing the rules.
Georgia just showed what happens when Democrats stop chasing ghosts and start talking to the people actually in front of them. In November 2025, two Democrats swept statewide elections to Georgia’s Public Service Commission, flipping seats Republicans had held for nearly two decades and winning nearly 63% of the vote. They didn’t run on culture war counterattacks or carefully triangulated faith messaging. They ran on electricity bills. On the audacity of a utility company raising rates while its shareholders cashed in. On the basic idea that a regulatory body should regulate for people, not for Georgia Power.
And an even bigger upset is Democrat Shawn Harris’s lead to take Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat, Harris who is leading the GOP candidate’ Fuller could very well add one more Democrat prior to the 2026 Midterms.
The results were read, even by Republican strategists on the ground, as less anti-Republican than anti-incumbent, a signal that voters are furious about grocery prices, housing costs, and energy bills, and will vote for whoever seems to take that fury seriously. That’s not a narrow opening. That’s a door standing wide open.
The Democrats flipped 22 counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2024, not by persuading those voters to abandon their cultural identity, but by giving them something concrete to vote for. The tribe instinct is real, but it has a threshold. When the lights cost too much and nobody in power seems to care, people will cross it.
This is the playbook Democrats keep forgetting they have. Not the one written around finding the right white moderate who can quote scripture without wincing. The one built around material conditions, the cost of staying alive in the place you live. It doesn’t require anyone to abandon their identity. It just requires a party to show up and say: the people running this system are getting rich while you fall behind, and we’re going to make that stop.
Texas is the long game. The demographics are real, the gerrymandering proves the GOP knows it, and the question is whether Democrats will organize around the electorate that exists rather than the one their consultants remember. Georgia is the proof of concept: a red state, a low-turnout race, a utilitarian message, and a landslide.
But templates only travel if someone picks them up. And that’s where the Democratic Party keeps losing the thread. The Georgia win didn’t happen because a national committee handed down a strategy. It happened because two candidates decided to talk about something real and voters responded. The problem isn’t that Democrats lack a message. It’s that no one seems authorized to carry it everywhere, not just in the districts where winning already feels possible.
The GOP has a unified voice. You can agree with it or despise it, but you always know what it is. Democrats keep waiting for permission to find theirs. That’s not a messaging problem. That’s a leadership problem, and until the party decides to solve it, Georgia stays an asterisk instead of becoming a blueprint.
The party doesn’t need a new theology. It needs someone willing to say the same true thing in everywhere and mean it every time.
This piece was inspired by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s essay “No, Jesus Won’t Save the Democratic Party” on her Substack, Alisa Writes.
