A quarter of rural voters in U.S. Senate battleground states said they are more likely to make voting decisions based on their faith than on their finances, according to a new poll. This includes voters in Maine — one of the most rural states in the country — where Democratic Senate candidates Graham Platner and Gov. Janet Mills are fighting for a chance to unseat longtime Senate Republican Susan Collins.

The poll, published April 21 by the Center for Rural Strategies and Democratic research firm Lake Research Partners, surveyed 600 voters in rural counties across 13 states with key Senate races this year, including Maine and New Hampshire.

According to the poll, independent and weak partisan rural voters were twice as likely to make voting decisions based on personal economic situations as on religion. Democrats put much more weight on their economic situations. Republicans slightly favored their finances over faith in choosing who to vote for but were the most likely of any group to be guided by faith. The poll had a 4-point margin of error.

Maine is among the least religious states in the country, and, while faith institutions have long played a central role in the state’s rural communities, rural Mainers are less likely to identify with a specific religion than voters in other parts of the country. 

Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine in Orono, said religion helps explain Maine’s recent electoral history. President Donald Trump won Maine’s rural 2nd Congressional District by just 10 points in 2024, a much closer margin than he won rural voters nationally. Part of why rural Maine voters are less conservative than rural voters elsewhere, Brewer said, is because they are less religious.

“Rural Maine is not rural Alabama in terms of its faith profile by any means,” Brewer said. Even as the Republican Party has built up a voter registration edge in rural communities, Brewer said the state’s relative disinterest in religion has kept that trend less pronounced than in other parts of the country.

Churches have increasingly highlighted political divides in rural America, said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies. The center opted to include several questions about faith in its recent poll to better understand how religious beliefs could influence upcoming elections.

When asked whether faith institutions unite or divide rural communities, Democrats were almost evenly split, but seven in 10 Republicans said those institutions united communities. Eight in 10 Republicans agreed that faith itself united communities, as did 55 percent of Democrats.

Republicans were more likely than Democrats to emphasize the importance of faith and faith institutions. Just two in 10 Democratic respondents said they attend a place of worship at least once a month, compared with nearly half of Republicans.

Still, respondents from both parties agreed that rural faith communities are important in times of crisis. 

Even though Democrats are less religious than Republicans, Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research, said the poll shows that they still largely view faith institutions favorably. Democratic leaders, she said, “should not cede that terrain to the other side.”

The poll also found that rural voters are largely pessimistic about both the U.S. as a whole and rural America, with a majority of respondents saying both are on the “wrong track.” More than 60 percent of rural voters backed Trump in 2024, but just 52 percent of poll respondents view him favorably today. 

Six in 10 rural voters support current immigration policies in the U.S., and nearly as many said they support mass deportation. Regardless of party, respondents rated the rising cost of living as their top concern, followed by health care.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.