This Evangelical Pastor Is Confident Many Christians Are Voting for Harris
On Tuesday night, Pastor Jim Ball and his wife participated crowd of more than 70,000 people who watched the Vice President Kamala Harris delivered his closing argument at the Ellipse Park in Washington, DC. The next day, he felt good about Harris’s chances even though polls showed the race was losing. “God is with us, even if the polls don’t come in,” he said with a laugh. “It will It would be more comforting if the polls were better.”
Ball, an ordained Baptist minister and longtime Christian environmental activist, has spent the past three months leading the group Missions for Harris, a political action committee that encourages Christians vote for the Democratic Party candidate. The PAC had its grand launch in August, hosting a Zoom call with an ecumenical and multiracial group of evangelical Christians talking about the benefits of the election. Since then, they have spent at least 1 million USD about ads supporting Harris.
In 2020, Ball’s team — then called Evangelicals for Biden — successfully targeted evangelical voters in swing states, and this time the effort was nationwide. Even though evangelism is a theological term refers to a set of beliefs about activism, conversion, and the role of the Bible, it began to gain political currency with the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks in part to Decades of investment in anti-abortion policies, the Republican Party has enjoyed solid support among evangelical voters since then, and in the 2020 election, Edison Poll shows Trump winning 76% of white evangelicals, while Biden won just 24%.
Even so, a swinging minority of self-identified evangelicals persist in voting Democratic, and they are often well-positioned geographically to swing a key district or two. “We have results from 2020 that show efforts to influence evangelical voters can make a difference,” Ball said. “Chairperson [Barack] Obama actually put the high watermark of 26% in 2008And that’s really our goal this year, to get to 26%.”
Ball’s group exists to rally those voters by appealing to biblical virtues, but they also want to shake a few things up. In early October, they released an ad that interspersed excerpts from Billy Graham’s speech about loving your neighbor with the former president’s recent comments about Haitian immigrants. Donald Trump. Franklin Graham, son of the late pastor and ardent Trump supporter, was unhappy with the inclusion of his father’s words and sent a “cease and desist” letter.
But the relevance of Graham’s words to the current debate is hard to dispute, and for Ball, it goes beyond modern hypocrisy. “Pastor Graham is reminding us what Jesus taught, which is to be everyone’s neighbor, especially those in need. That is the meaning of the parable of the good samaritan, and that is what guided Vice President Harris,” Ball said. “In terms of reaching the vulnerable and protecting the vulnerable, that was her career goal.”
Vanity Fair: How do you feel about the election and the work you’ve done with just a few days left?
Pastor Jim Ball: So my intuition about everything that’s going on is that we’re going to win. So I hope it’s not too close right now in the polls and all that, but I think the momentum is definitely on our side. I think there will be a lot of Harris voters coming out to vote. Motivation is very high. So I feel optimistic about our chances and I think Vice President Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Her talk [Tuesday at the Ellipse] was right on target in contrasting her with Mr. Trump and the threat he represents.
