2024 Election Post-Mortem: Evangelicals
Of course white evangelicals love Trump, but non-white evangelicals are warming up to him, too.
What in the world happened in the 2024 presidential election? It’s a question I’ve been asked by dozens of media outlets over the last six months. But I had a big problem: no reliable data that would aid me in answering such a question. The exit polls, no matter what anyone tells you, should not be considered gospel. There are a number of fundamental flaws in their design that make it impossible to rely on them to construct an accurate portrayal of what actually happened on election day. Their real purpose? To fill air time on election night while the major networks wait for the results to pile again across the United States.
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Church Attendance and Voting for Trump
It’s the one statement that won’t die: Trump rode to victory on the backs of Republicans who aren’t that religiously active. I wrote about it in my book, 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America because it just kept coming up over and over again. Here’s why this myth is so pernicious. It can be incredibly useful for people on either side of the p…
But all that’s changed now and my goal over the next couple of months is to tell the story of the campaign between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris using data from the newly released Cooperative Election Study. This survey indicates that 22% of all American adults align with an evangelical denomination. Seventeen percent of the sample are white evangelicals and just over 5% are non-white evangelicals. Among those non-white evangelicals, 38% were Black and 28% were Hispanic.
Let’s start by visualizing the results of the last five presidential elections among those three groups of evangelicals.
It should come as no surprise that evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in 2024, because they gave him a tremendous amount of support in both 2016 and 2020. But, it’s noteworthy that Trump continued to make inroads among evangelicals - his share of the vote went from 70% to 75% in the last three elections. The Democrats have not done well at all with evangelicals. Their best effort was in 2012 when Obama got 30% of their votes. But Harris did slightly worse than Biden - 23% vs 25%. But it’s notable that Biden got the same share of the evangelical vote as Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Of course, Trump’s real base of support is specifically among white evangelicals. In 2016, Trump’s vote share was no different than McCain in 2008 or Romney’s in 2012 - about 77%. But in 2020, Trump ran up the score just a bit - garnering 81% of the white evangelical vote. The data from 2024 says he continued to win over the white evangelical vote at 83% - the highest on record.
However the breakdown of the non-white evangelical vote may tell the story of the 2024 election when it comes to religion. Republicans have historically struggled with this group of voters. In 2008, Obama enjoyed an 18 point advantage and that expanded dramatically in the next couple of election cycles. In 2012, the non-white evangelical vote was D+30 and it was D+25 in 2016. But then in 2020, Trump managed to make some inroads - getting back to 40% and narrowing the gap to 18 points. But look at 2024 - a huge shift. The non-white evangelical vote was essentially split in 2024 - Harris 49% and Trump at 48%. Harris lost at least ten points with this constituency - a huge blow.
Let’s dig one layer down now into religious attendance.
There’s a lot going on in this graph but I think that the big narrative is how Trump just continues to make gains among evangelical voters. Between 2016 and 2024 he gained five points among yearly attending evangelicals, eight points among monthly attending evangelicals, seven points among weekly attendees and eight points among those who attended multiple times per week. However, Trump didn’t actually lose ground with those who attend less than once a year.
Here’s a stat that will probably end up being quoted somewhere - 90% of white evangelicals who attended church multiple times per week supported Trump in 2024. That was a nine point gain from 2016. The white evangelical results just basically mirror the analysis from the entire evangelical sample. He made gains at every attendance level from yearly on up. The only question I have when looking at this graph is: how high can he go with this group? Ninety percent is essentially unanimous in the world of public polling.
What about those non-white evangelicals? I would direct your attention to the bottom right of the graph. Donald Trump made really sizable gains with the high attenders. Between 2016 and 2024, Trump’s share went from 33% to 47% among non-white evangelicals who attend church every week. He did thirteen points better among those who attend religious services multiple times per week. But there are also increases among yearly attenders and monthly attenders, too.
Is this an age thing, though?
I’m not going to spend a lot of time describing the top two graphs here beyond this simple maxim - older evangelicals are more pro-Trump than younger ones. Among white evangelicals specifically, Trump got 64% of the 18-29 year group but did about 20 points better among those who were at least 75 years old. And it’s a really smooth gradient - each bucket is slightly more Republican than the prior one and it doesn’t really deviate that much.
Now, the bottom set of graphs is incredibly interesting and should be insightful for political observers. We know that Trump saw big gains among non-white evangelicals, but were they younger or older? In this analysis - I can specifically point to one age group - 30 to 44 years old. Only 29% of them voted for Trump in 2016. In the 2024 election that jumped to 48%. Which is higher than both the 18-29 or 60-74 groups. But he also gained eleven points among that 60-74 group, too.
Now, there’s been this narrative that I’ve seen bandied about a bit online that Trump’s big wins were among people who identified as ideologically moderate. David Shor talked about it in a podcast with Ezra Klein. I had to see if that was especially the case with our evangelical sample.
It should come as no surprise that Trump did not do well with liberal evangelicals - not that there were many of them, anyway. But the second row of bar graphs tells a compelling story about the 2024 result compared to four years earlier. Among white evangelical moderates, 53% of them voted for Trump in 2020. That share rose to 66% in 2024. Among non-white evangelical moderates, Trump’s share also increased by nine percentage points.
And there’s more, look at the bottom row - especially for the non-white evangelicals. In 2020, Trump only received 78% of non-white evangelicals who identified as politically conservative. In 2024, that jumped up to 85%. At the same time, he won almost all the conservative white evangelical vote (97%). That’s what always surprises me about Trump - he makes gains in one area without really losing anywhere else. That’s hard to do.
But let me offer you one more bit of analysis that may help explain the 2024 result. It’s a series of questions that asks folks to place a bunch of people and groups on an ideological scale that runs from very liberal to very conservative. I am going to show you how evangelicals placed Harris, Biden, the Democratic Party, Trump, the Republican Party and themselves on this scale.
One striking detail: evangelicals saw Harris as more ideologically liberal than Biden. That’s true among white and non-white evangelicals alike. The differences weren’t huge (usually about a quarter of a point on a six point scale) but the data doesn’t lie - Harris was seen as a liberal. It’s also notable that evangelicals saw Biden as slightly more conservative than the Democratic party as a whole while Harris was slightly more liberal than the Democratic party.
What About White Evangelicals Who Aren't Conservative?
Every once in a while I will get an email from someone who doesn’t really fit the mold. An atheist who has voted for Donald Trump numerous times. A Black Protestant who is increasingly becoming more aligned with conservative politics. And, what feels like an increasing number of white evangelicals who are not so closely aligned with the Republican party…
What about Trump? Well evangelicals saw him as slightly more conservative than the GOP. The gap was incredibly consistent across all three of these groups. In each case, the mean score was about 6 on a scale from 1 to 7.
But also take note of where non-white evangelicals put themselves on this continuum - much more moderate than white evangelicals. They also tended to see the Democrats as significantly less liberal than their white evangelical counterparts. Said another way - white evangelicals have a much more polarized view of the major players in American politics compared to non-white evangelicals.
Looked at broadly, I think this analysis provides a lot of empirical support for the narrative that spun out of Election Night - the Democrats have a big problem with non-white voters. What’s stunning to me is that even though non-white evangelicals didn’t see the Democrats as being too extreme, they still threw a lot of support behind Donald Trump. One interpretation of this is that this voting bloc is not firmly in GOP control now - they still see the Democratic party as fairly sensible and moderate.
How Democrats might win these voters back—that’s a different story entirely.
Code for this post can be found here.
Where I live abortion is the litmus test. Every preacher will tell you that God will be seriously mad at you if you vote for a baby-killing Democrat.
"I wonder what are the politically salient events which are impacting these 30-44 year old non-white Evangelicals."
Among what I'd expect to be salient (falling in this age range myself):
The civil-rights movement is something this demographic learned of as history. I'm at home in Mainline congregations, and I've noticed that older Mainline leaders talk about the civil-rights struggle as if they're still part of it, not just as a matter of political polarization (though that plays a role, too), but because they're old enough to have *been* part of it at an age when it shaped their identity. Having lived through it makes it harder to forget when the GOP decided to "hunt where the ducks are" and accept a segregationist bloc into its party as an electoral strategy. But if you didn't live through it (as I didn't), forgetting's easier.
Institutional distrust makes conspiracy-theorizing more appealing. Minorities often have good reason to feel institutional distrust. For example, minorities aren't entirely imagining it when they perceive medical gatekeepers, for example, as taking them less seriously (nor are women entirely imagining it). Feeling dismissed by mainstream medicine understandably makes alt-med, with its often-conspiratorial mindset toward mainstream medicine, more appealing. And similarly for other institutions. Feeling dismissed from the mainstream makes trusting Alex-Jones-style crankery easier. And the GOP is now considerably less embarrassed to call such crankery its own.