A Sixty Year History of White Evangelicals and Politics
A comprehensive look at partisanship and voting patterns among the most important religious bloc on election day.
If you ask the chattering class who pay attention to the intersection of religion and politics to name one statistic about voting patterns, I can guess with a high degree of certainty which one that they will recall:
81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
I speak to members of the media on a regular basis. I get asked some questions with such frequency that I basically have stock answers to them, which I recite dutifully on the phone or via Zoom, using the exact same syntax and verbiage. One of those questions is simply: Why do so many evangelicals support Donald Trump?
When I did an interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, I got asked a version of that question at least three times during the hour long exchange we had. I answered it the same way every time.
It’s a transactional relationship. Donald Trump is an empty vessel of a candidate. I believe he has no internal moral framework. His calculus is quite simple. You give me votes, I give you what you want.
In 2016, nearly four in ten votes cast for the Republican nominee came from white evangelicals. In return, Roe was overturned. Was electing a thrice-married casino magnate worth it? Many evangelicals will say that saving innocent babies from death justified the price of a Trump vote.
Put simply, the ends justify the means.
However, I bristle at the underlying motivation of that question—why do white evangelicals vote for Trump? Because the answer is even simpler: they vote for Trump because white evangelicals are Republicans, and Donald Trump is the standard bearer of the GOP. That's the same reason they voted for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.
However, I wanted to take a long view of this question—have white evangelicals always been Republicans, or is this a very recent phenomenon? To answer this, I loaded up the American National Election Study (ANES), a dataset I hardly ever use because of my strong dislike for how it has handled religion over time. To be blunt, it’s a huge pain to use, and very few scholars of religion and politics utilize it because it’s so incredibly cumbersome.
Let's begin the inquiry by tracing the political partisanship of white evangelicals from 1960 through 2020, using data from the ANES.
When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, the white evangelical voting bloc was significantly different from what it is today. For every one white evangelical Republican, there were two white evangelical Democrats (61% vs. 30%). However, since that time, the trend lines have all moved in essentially the same direction—the Republican share increases, and the Democrat share decreases.
Around 1970, the proportion of white evangelicals who were Democrats fell below 50%. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, however, that the proportion of white evangelical Republicans clearly rose above 50%. Even into the Reagan era, the share of white evangelicals who were Democrats was functionally similar to the percentage who aligned with the GOP.
Since 2000, there has been a marked shift to the right. When George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, about half of white evangelicals were Republicans, and 35% were Democrats. By the time Donald Trump faced off against Joe Biden in 2020, those percentages had shifted to 78% and 16%, respectively. White evangelicals have never been more politically homogeneous than they are at present.
While political partisanship is clearly a significant factor, it doesn’t fully capture the nuances of electoral politics. Actual votes are a more accurate metric when focusing on tangible outcomes. Here’s a look at how white evangelicals have cast their votes in every presidential election since 1960.
This graph provides a markedly different impression from the previous one, covering sixteen presidential elections. Notably, there's only one election where the majority of white evangelicals decisively favored the Democrat—Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, receiving two-thirds of their votes. Excluding this outlier, it becomes evident that white evangelicals have had a long-standing preference against the Democrats, at least over the last six decades.
The Jimmy Carter/Gerald Ford matchup in 1976 was the closest during this period, yet even then, the white evangelical vote favored the Republicans by 16 points (R+16). It's unusual to find an election where the margin is less than 20 percentage points. Over the last five elections, the average margin has expanded to R+58, indicating a significant and increasing tilt towards the Republicans in recent decades.
However, a careful analysis raises an interesting question. Despite the fact that until the 1980s, the proportion of white evangelicals identifying as Republicans was not overwhelmingly high—hovering around 50%—Reagan still secured 79% of their votes in his reelection bid, and George H.W. Bush garnered nearly as much, at 75%, in 1988.
To better illustrate this discrepancy, I will create a graph that juxtaposes the percentage of white evangelicals identifying as Republicans (represented in blue bars) against the percentage who voted for the Republican candidate (in orange bars) for every presidential election since 1960.
This approach highlights the disparity between political identification and actual voting behavior, shedding light on the nuanced and evolving political dynamics within the white evangelical community over time.
This numerical disparity now becomes strikingly clear: While evangelical voters have historically been hesitant to label themselves as Republicans when discussing their political affiliations, they have consistently demonstrated a willingness to support the GOP nominee in presidential elections. The election of Richard Nixon in 1972 stands out in this regard. Just 36% of white evangelicals were Republicans, yet 84% of them cast a ballot for Nixon in November of 1972. In essence, partisanship was a trailing indicator of what was really going on in the political world of white evangelicals. And this gulf existed for decades.
In the graph below, I took the share of white evangelicals who said that they voted for the Republican and then subtracted the share of white evangelicals who identified as Republicans in terms of their partisanship. This brings this trend into much sharper focus.
From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the gap between self-identified political affiliation and voting behavior among white evangelicals averaged between twenty-five and thirty percentage points. This indicates that a significant number of individuals who did not identify as Republicans were nonetheless voting for Republican candidates. However, this discrepancy began to decrease throughout the 1980s. By 1990, the gap had halved to about 15%. Over the last thirty years, it has narrowed further, currently standing at approximately ten percentage points. This shift suggests that the lagging indicator (partisanship) is increasingly aligning with the leading indicator (vote choice).
Historically, what happened here? Any cursory look at recent political history should point us to the Southern realignment that happened in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To that point in American history, most poor white Southerners had been dutiful supporters of the Democrats. This was a vestige of FDR’s New Deal, which provided all kinds of financial support to folks living in the Bible Belt.
But, in the mid-1960s, the mood began to shift. The Civil Rights movement led to the passage of two historic bills - the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both were signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. After signing that legislation, Johnson said in passing to one of his aides Bill Moyers, “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.” And, of course, LBJ was right.
What followed was a campaign by the Republican party, specifically Richard Nixon, to appeal to the racial views of white evangelicals living in the South. This is popularly known as the Southern Strategy. One of the chief architects of this approach was Lee Atwater. After his death, a tape of Atwater detailing his approach to campaign messaging emerged which is both incredibly illuminating and also unbelievably disturbing at the same time.
What this data makes clear to me is that the Southern Strategy was immediately effective at shifting the vote choice of white evangelicals even if they did not immediately change their partisan affiliation. In fact, it would take several decades (and a lot of generational replacement) for the vast majority of white evangelicals to become comfortable in calling themselves Republicans.
Code for this post can be found here.
There is an argument to be made that all political realignment in America starts with desegregation. Even the rise of abortion as a political wedge seems tied to it, linking conservative Catholic and conservative Protestant interests in a way they had not been before. Talk radio, Heritage schools, states rights vs. greater federalism--desegregation was the reformulation of the Civil War. Identity is slow to follow practice, but it happens eventually.
Your final paragraph asserts that white evangelicals voted republican in the past because they were motivated by racism. The inference seems to be that white evangelical vote today are motivated by that same racism. Is that what you intended to say?