With less than a month until the 2026 midterm elections, Black faith leaders across the country are doing something that goes far beyond Sunday sermons and sanctuary walls. From parking lot rallies in Georgia to multistate bus tours retracing the routes of Freedom Riders, Black churches are deploying an unprecedented range of strategies to ensure their communities can — and do — vote, even as new restrictions and a climate of uncertainty make that harder than it has been in decades.
The stakes, organizers say, are clear: recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened the Voting Rights Act, hundreds of thousands of voter registrations have been purged from state rolls, and questions linger about whether federal immigration enforcement could show up near polling places this fall. Homeland Security and ICE officials have said there are no such plans, but President Trump said he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” when speaking to reporters in May. Against that backdrop, Black churches are adapting their voter mobilization playbooks — and expanding them.
A Community Navigating Exhaustion and Renewed Urgency
New data from Pew Research Center shows that 70% of Black voters are backing Democratic candidates in the midterms, while 7% support Republicans. The same data shows that 81% of Black voters who backed Joe Biden in 2020 turned out in 2024. But voter mobilizers say turning out that same energy again requires confronting real fatigue — particularly after former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President Trump — alongside economic anxieties over gas prices and groceries.
A September survey by the University of California San Diego found that only 49% of Americans expect “free and fair” midterm elections. Twenty-three percent said they do not, and 28% were unsure. Forty percent or more of people of color said they expected to face intimidation at the polls or believed ICE would likely be present on Election Day.
That uncertainty is precisely why the Rev. James C. Perkins, a Baptist minister in Detroit and Michigan leader of Faiths United to Save Democracy, says the work cannot stop. The coalition is holding new “mobilization and unity” rallies across nine states, including a series of virtual events designed to reach voters before Election Day.
“This virtual rally is just another tool in our toolbox that we can use to steer people prior to the actual Election Day,”
said Perkins, a former president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
“We have to try to make it so big it can’t be rigged.”
Perkins also acknowledged the complicated political terrain in his own state. Many Black voters have mixed feelings about Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whose race is one of roughly a dozen contests considered key to determining control of the Senate.
“He was not widely known in the Black community prior to this, even though he had served as director of health for Detroit,”
Perkins said.
“He was not engaged as such, as widely engaged, I should say, in the Black community as he needs to be now.”
Beyond candidate concerns, Perkins said some would-be voters feel the Democratic Party hasn’t done enough to push back against the current administration.
“I think there’s a sense among some that the Democratic Party has not been assertive enough in confronting the present administration that, in spite of the fact that we don’t control either the Senate or the House, that there ought to have been something that we could have done to make it look and feel like we’re fighting,”
he said.
Polling Places, Purged Rolls, and the Push to Register
In Georgia, the challenge of voter roll purges is front and center. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger oversaw the removal of some 450,000 outdated voter registrations in 2025 — a move he has described as part of “election safeguards,” but which is now the subject of a lawsuit by Black Voters Matter Fund and two union groups. For the Black community in and around Atlanta, the purges mean people who believe they are registered may show up to find they are not.
That reality drove Impact Church in East Point, Georgia, to host roughly 350 people in its parking lot in early October for a post-worship rally, complete with food trucks and a DJ, where attendees could check their voter registration and sign up to text or call others about getting to the polls. Early voting in Georgia began October 13.
“People will be checking their registration because, in Georgia, a lot of people have gotten purged, but they may not know it,”
said Deborah Scott, CEO and president of the nonprofit Georgia Stand-Up and a trustee of a United Methodist church north of Atlanta’s airport.
Reducing the number of polling sites is another concern for voting rights advocates. In Tarrant County, Texas, Republican commissioners voted to cut polling places by almost one-third — a decision that prompted a lawsuit, according to the Fort Worth Report. The Rev. Michael W. Waters, pastor of Abundant Life African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dallas, pointed to that situation as exactly why turnout work is so urgent.
Waters is leading an eight-state, 19-city tour in the two weeks before Election Day, retracing the routes of Freedom Riders from 65 years ago. About 50 people are expected to travel the full journey by bus, car, and motorcycle, stopping at houses of worship and historically Black colleges and universities. The tour — called “The Ride” — will pass through cities like Greensboro, North Carolina; Anniston, Alabama; and Nashville, Tennessee, all in states where redistricting has split up majority-Black voting areas.
“We will be going in many ways to the spaces and places where they have already gone in decades before as a way to uplift and support our communities today and to empower them to get out the vote,”
said Waters, who also serves as director of Black voter engagement for Vote Common Good.
“In the same spaces and places where they fought to bring about liberation are the spaces and places where democracy is under duress.”
“A Thousand Marches to the Polls”
Bishop William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach, is calling for a dramatic show of civic participation the moment early voting opens in each state. Standing alongside Black clergy and Illinois Democratic Rep. Jonathan Jackson — son of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson — on National Voter Registration Day in front of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Barber framed the act of voting as an act of remembrance and resistance.
“We are calling on a thousand marches to the polls, the first day of early voting in every state,”
Barber said.
“And the reason we want you to do this is because every attempt to retrogress voting rights is an attempt to desecrate the graves of our foremothers and fathers.”
As of October 9, Barber’s organization had secured signups from more than 600 individuals, churches, and other groups in more than 400 locations — stretching from Seattle to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands — representing more than half of their goal. Related mobilization efforts, including a March on Washington that renewed focus on voting rights after the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, have been building momentum for months.
Navigating Voter Fatigue and the “I’m Done” Group
The Rev. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a co-convener of Faiths United to Save Democracy — a multiracial, nonpartisan group with deep roots in Black church voter mobilization — is working with clergy, lay leaders, and members of other faith traditions to station polling chaplains and peacekeepers at voting sites. Their mission: welcome voters and defuse tensions.
But Williams-Skinner is also focused on reconnecting with those who have disengaged since 2024. She acknowledged a real segment of the community that has tuned out, particularly Black women who feel targeted by the Trump administration’s cuts to civil service jobs and DEI programs.
“We’re seeing the ‘I’m done’ group because Black women feel that they have been singularly targeted in the civil service cuts, in the DEI cuts by this administration,”
she said.
“I don’t think that’s the majority. I think a majority of Black people who have for 407 years been dealing with systemic racism, we always have — there’s a spirit and seed of hope in us that if we keep fighting, things will be better — not necessarily for our lives, but for our children’s children’s lives.”
Congregations, Coalitions, and Postcard Campaigns
Pastor Mike McBride, executive director of Live Free USA and co-founder of the Black Church PAC, is coordinating twice-a-week phone banks and text-a-thons before the midterms. His goal is to get 1,000 congregations working in concert to push early voting messages. He has partnered with organizations including Faith Out Loud! and All Roads Lead to the South — a movement responding to recent Supreme Court voting rights decisions — through Freedom Summer 2026 programs and “Justice Revivals” involving some 400 congregations.
“We need everybody to gather, to organize, to activate, to train, and to show up and show out,”
McBride said.
“And so, our hope is to get 1,000 congregations moving in some concert together, pushing early voting messages, so our communities don’t have to stand in long lines.”
McBride also sounded the alarm on declining philanthropic support. The Associated Press reported in September that donations from wealthy philanthropists to voting groups focused on communities of color have dropped since the 2024 presidential election.
“It has been very disheartening to see donors and philanthropic partners and even in some regards political campaigns and Democratic Party institutions, in essence, defund voter engagement strategies,”
he said.
The Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC) is also stepping up, joining forces with the AFL-CIO and Rainbow Push Coalition — now led by Yusef Jackson, who has succeeded his father as head of the civil rights organization. Together, they are planning “People’s Revival” events in Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas at historically Black colleges and churches to offer voter education and texting outreach training. National Baptist leaders and advocates have also urged midterm voter turnout at recent denominational gatherings.
One of the PNBC’s more distinctive innovations this cycle is a postcard campaign. Deirdra Reed, a lead organizer with the denomination’s Social Justice Commission, said they hope dozens of churches will use portions of their October worship services to write postcards to infrequent voters in targeted states. The approach has been used in secular circles, but Reed frames the PNBC version as inspired by the New Testament letters of Paul to the churches at Corinth and Rome.
“We’re modeling this idea of letters from the churches of PNBC that, hey, this is an election season — not telling you who to vote for,”
Reed said.
“But what we want you to understand is that we believe that voting is a sacred sacrament and that you should vote.”
The Rev. Micah Gaines, whose Detroit church — also PNBC-affiliated — serves as a polling site, plans to serve as a poll chaplain as he has in previous election cycles and has committed to join the postcard campaign. He pushed back directly on social media narratives suggesting that individual votes don’t matter.
“We cannot afford to be lackadaisical or to be apathetic or to just feel like there’s no hope because there are still active battles for us to fight,”
he said.
“Which is why, as a Black church, we have to ensure that we’re not just coming on Sunday mornings and having a great, great time and not doing any activism, any justice work after that, because there’s an actual battle being fought every single day of the week.”
Bus Tours, Interfaith Outreach, and the Long View of History
The Interfaith Alliance has launched a 15-state bus tour that officially kicked off on October 6 at the Tri-Faith Initiative in Omaha, Nebraska. Several predominantly Black churches are hosting tour stops. The tour included a preview visit to the United Methodist church in Kansas City pastored by the Rev. Emanuel Cleaver III, son of the Missouri congressman, and is scheduled to make a later stop at Dallas’ Friendship-West Baptist Church, led by congressional candidate the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III, who is among at least a dozen pastors running for office this year as Democrats and is widely expected to win his race.
The sustained organizing by Black clergy following the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has also found expression in Atlanta, where The Soul of Atlanta — a year-old civic organization that expanded from DEI advocacy to voting rights — is bringing speakers including the Rev. Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and longtime civil rights activist, to weekday rallies at historically Black churches. Young is expected to speak at Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Lilburn, Georgia — one of the oldest Black churches in North Georgia — on October 22.
Ray McClendon, a planning committee member of The Soul of Atlanta and member of a predominantly Black United Methodist church in the city, framed the current moment in stark historical terms.
“Some people thought that we were in a post-racial America with the election of President Obama, and that people could really just say, thank God, we’ve finally seen this, and now we can just live regular lives,”
he said.
“But they’ve seen that there’s been a terrible reversal once Obama left office, and it has really turned back the clock to the 1950s, and I truly believe that these clergy and faith leaders are recognizing that they need the same type or even more urgent response as was in the 1950s and ’60s.”
The Supreme Court also allowed states to use a controversial Trump administration database to screen for possible noncitizen voting, adding another layer of uncertainty to an already charged environment. For Black churches, all of these pressures point in one direction: the work of getting eligible voters to the polls cannot wait for Election Day — it has to happen every day between now and then.
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