Coalitions of religious and civic organizations have taken to the nation’s roads to urge Americans to vote in the midterm elections.
Interfaith Alliance’s 15-state “The Vote is Sacred” bus tour officially kicked off Oct. 6 in Omaha, Neb., in an effort to mobilize faith communities for Election Day. The tour already has been through Midwestern states and is scheduled to swing through the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and California before concluding in Denver Nov. 5. Participants will join in a No Kings early voting initiative during an Oct. 17 stop in Charlotte, N.C.
The 9,000-mile trek already has generated multifaith and multicultural turnout at each stop, Interfaith Alliance President Paul Raushenbush said during a rally in Des Moines, Iowa Oct. 6.
“The vote is sacred, and our democracy is worth preserving … and people want to vote and they want to participate in our democracy,” he said. “We want to make sure every vote is not only cast without intimidation but is able to be counted without any sort of (interference) and also certified in the end.”
The Progressive National Baptist Convention is set to launch the bus-tour component of “The People’s Revival” in conjunction with Rainbow PUSH Coalition and AFL-CIO. The first stop will be First Nazareth Baptist Church in Columbia, S.C., Oct. 16, followed by stops in Charlotte and Durham, N.C., Atlanta and Houston.
The revival is a voter education, voter mobilization, voter protection and civic engagement campaign to encourage Black Americans to get to the polls during early voting or on Nov. 3. Volunteers are being recruited to send postcards and text messages to registered voters, organize Souls to the Polls events so congregations can vote together and help build community networks promoting long-term voting turnout and social change.
“This is more than a campaign. This is a movement,” PNBC President Keith Byrd said. “This is a revival of conscience, a revival of participation and a revival of the people’s determination to make their voices heard.
Yusef Jackson, son of the late Jesse Jackson and president of Rainbow PUSH Coalition, said the tour and wider revival effort are strengthened by the cooperation between his organization, PNBC and AFL-CIO.
“With our democratic rights being intentionally cut to silence minority communities, this historic alliance is necessary to fight back. But uniting the moral authority of the church with the organizing power of labor unions, we are building a multi-state volunteer infrastructure that ensures our communities are deeply moved to take decisive action at the ballot box.”
Vote Common Good’s “Faith, Hope and Love” bus began its 50-plus city tour in August and is expected to be rolling into early November, the faith-based voter-engagement group announced.
Vote Common Good bus tour route
The tour website promotes a clearly partisan, anti-Christian nationalism message: “Flipping the House blue this November starts with people of faith showing up in the districts that matter.”
Vote Common Good Executive Director Doug Pagitt pushed back against the notion that faith and politics don’t mix.
Doug Pagitt
“You don’t have to check your faith at the door to be a good citizen. And you don’t have to compromise democracy to be a person of faith,” he said during a stop in Iowa. During a rally in New Jersey, Pagitt said Americans need to know that conservatives don’t corner the market in having and talking about religious convictions.
“We feel like we can’t talk to our neighbor let alone feel like we can love them, and wouldn’t it be great for our politics to get beyond that? We travel in this bus back there with these flags that say, ‘Faith, Hope and Love,’ and a lot of people think that only Republicans would talk about faith hope and love, but that’s not true.”
Vote Common Good also announced it is teaming with a coalition of faith and civic groups staging a tour tracing the bus route Black and white activists took through Southern states during the Civil Rights Movement: “Two weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, a coalition of civil rights leaders, artists, faith leaders and original Freedom Riders retraces the 1961 Freedom Ride route — from Washington, D.C. through the Deep South to New Orleans, the city the original riders never reached.”
In addition to Vote Common Good, “The Ride” is being convened by Greater Things Foundation, Faith Out Loud, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Red Letter Christians.
The original Freedom Riders were met with racial violence and arrests, and global media coverage, during their travels to protest segregation. As a result, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation at interstate travel facilities.
“Original members of the 1961 Freedom Rides — and the children, nephews and grandchildren who carry their names — will meet the buses along the route,” organizers of “The Ride” said.