Evangelicals for Harris has ties to Billy Graham’s granddaughter. Will it sway race?

A new evangelical group with ties to high-profile evangelicals, including the late Rev. Billy Graham’s granddaughter, has come out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

Jerushah Duford, whose mother is Virginia Graham Tchividjian, Graham’s eldest daughter, was one of 19 speakers on a Zoom call Wednesday, Aug. 14, hosted by the group Evangelicals for Harris. The call included about 3,200 people, the Rev. Jim Ball, who founded the group, told McClatchy News.

“Voting Kamala, for me, is so much greater than policies. It’s a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread,” Duford said in a pre-recorded video shown during the call.

According to Pew Research Center, Christians made up a majority of registered voters in 2020, with 18% of registered voters identifying as white evangelical Protestants — a group largely assumed by experts to more strongly support former President Donald Trump.

But Evangelicals for Harris’ believes it could change that and impact the overall election, said Ball, who identifies as a political independent.

Could the group sway the election?

David Campbell, political scientist and professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame, told McClatchy News that he’s skeptical about any group of evangelicals organizing for Harris having a major sway within the evangelical community in this election cycle. He noted that roughly 80% of white evangelicals are “squarely in the Republican camp.”

However, Campbell did say that 20% of white evangelicals who lean Democrat or who are open to voting Democrat make up a large number of voters generally and could have an impact on the overall election if mobilized.

Jacob Neiheisel, who holds a doctorate in political science and teaches at the University at Buffalo, said the opposite. While he doesn’t think the group will have a sway in the overall election, he think it’s possible the group could have an impact among evangelical voters.

He noted that evangelicals on both sides of the political spectrum have used similar scriptures and “similar influences” to “make very different kinds of pushes.”

“There’s enough wiggle room there in the scriptures that both sides are drawing on to come to diametrically opposed positions,” Neheisel told McClatchy News.

Political scientist and statistician Ryan Burge told McClatchy News that he sees the group potentially having an impact among evangelicals of color.

He said there were “a lot of non-white speakers” at the Evangelicals for Harris event.

“I think that’s a really interesting turn on evangelicalism, because it’s perceived as a white phenomenon, at least that’s the common understanding of it. So I think if there’s any sort of long term implications from this, it might change the idea of what an evangelical is to the average person and make it a little more racially diverse,” Burge said.

What to know about Evangelicals for Harris

Balls said the group began in 2019 under the name Evangelicals for Biden and started back up this election cycle as he saw “even more of a threat to democracy.”

After president Biden ended his bid for reelection and endorsed vice president Harris on July 21, the group changed its name to Evangelicals for Harris within the hour, Ball said. The group hopes to target evangelicals who have voted for Democrats in the past, specifically in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina, he said.

On its website, the group describes itself as “a community of evangelicals upholding our values in the 2024 election.”

For Ball, being an evangelical simply means being a follower of Christ who wants to share God’s word with others, he said.

But Burge said the American public understands the term differently, instead taking it to mean a person having conservative values.

“Twenty-five years ago, most people never heard the word evangelical. It just wasn’t part of common vernacular, and the reason that most people have heard of it now is almost always in the context of politics,” Burge said, adding that he thinks a modifier is needed to distinguish religious evangelicals versus cultural evangelicals.

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