What Pulls Christians Toward Trump: Abortion or Immigration?

New 2024 data show when abortion matters more than the border—and when it doesn’t.

Way back in the halcyon days of the COVID lockdown, I wrote a post for Religion in Public that I still think about from time to time: For White Evangelical Republicans, Approval of Trump is About Immigration more than Abortion. You can probably guess the content of said missive based on the title of the post. But the long and short of it is this: using a question about presidential approval ratings for Donald Trump, I came to the conclusion that abortion is not the deal breaker for white evangelicals that a lot of people think it is.

In fact, I contended that the issue of immigration may be the “bright line” in evangelical politics. The data seemed to point to the reality that white evangelical Republicans would be more likely to support a politician who was in favor of legalized abortion but took a hard-line stance on immigration, compared to the reverse.

Well, it’s been a very long time since I wrote that post, and I feel like I have to revisit that general argument to see if it still stands up. But this post has two key differences: I am going to use vote choice in the 2024 presidential election as my dependent variable, and I’m going to focus on more groups than just white evangelicals. I am going to include all Protestants, Catholics, LDS, and Orthodox Christians. That should provide a more complete picture of what’s actually going on when it comes to issues and vote choice.

So, let’s start by showing how each of those groups feels about four different facets of immigration policy:

1. Building a wall between the United States and Mexico

2. Providing permanent resident status to children of immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents (also known as Dreamers), including a pathway to citizenship if they meet the requirements and have committed no crimes

3. Increasing the number of border patrol agents on the U.S.–Mexico border

4. Granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes

I broke the sample down into people who voted for Kamala Harris and those who supported Donald Trump on Election Day.

As you can quickly sort out based on the graph above, there are some questions that generate a huge partisan divide and others where the gap between red and blue is pretty small. For instance, when it comes to building a wall on the southern border, the two sets of dots are just miles apart. It’s basically orthodoxy among Trump voters that a wall is a good thing—support is 90%+. For those who voted for Harris, it’s much lower (typically around 20–25%). I do need to point out that Black Protestants are far more supportive than other Christian groups, though.

But when it comes to increasing border patrols, you can see that the gap is incredibly small. Again, Republicans are in almost lockstep on this: 90–95% of most groups support more border agents. But even among many Harris voters, this is seen as a good idea. It’s supported by about three-quarters of large groups like white Catholics and white evangelicals who voted for the Democrat.

You can generally see what’s happening here, right? Trump voters are in favor of strong borders and more walls and aren’t huge fans of creating a pathway to citizenship for people who came here illegally, either as children or adults.

Now let’s do the same thing, but with four questions about abortion:

1. Always allow a woman the right to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice

2. Expand access to abortion, including making it more affordable, broadening the types of providers who can offer care, and protecting access to abortion clinics

3. Make abortions illegal in all circumstances

4. Permit abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger

I come away with the same general impression from the previous graph—there are some aspects of this debate that are strongly polarized, and there are facets of abortion that aren’t really that divided by whether someone voted for Harris or Trump.

In the latter category, you can see this when it comes to a complete ban. That’s a position that very few people seem enamored with. Among white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2024, only 27% want to see abortion made completely illegal in the United States. That’s basically the ceiling for support.

However, compare that graph to the one directly to its right, where the question is about abortion access in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger. You can see that the partisan gap is also pretty small here, but support among both Harris and Trump voters is much higher. But I’ve never liked this question, and here’s why: if I’m a completely pro-life person, I say “oppose” to this question. If I’m a completely pro-choice person, I also say “oppose,” because it restricts abortion to only certain scenarios.

You do see the classic partisan divide on the question about expanding abortion access, though—huge gaps between the two parties on this one. In many cases, it’s a sixty-point difference, if not more. So I think the abortion debate is really about specific battlegrounds rather than an “across-the-board” type of thing.

So here’s where things get fun for me. I wanted to figure out where all these groups line up across these two policy areas. I used just two statements for this analysis: Always allow a woman the right to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice and grant legal status to all undocumented immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.

(And yes, I fully understand that people are going to quibble with me for reducing this to pro-abortion and anti-abortion. But guess what? I tried to figure out a better way to do this for an hour, and this is what I landed on, because it was immediately clear to me what each square represented when I looked at the heatmap.)

Here’s what may come as a shock to people: just a bare majority of white evangelicals said that women shouldn’t have access to abortion if she wants one for any reason and that there shouldn’t be a pathway to citizenship for people who came here illegally. It was only 53% of them. This is why I love statistics, really—they provide a more complete understanding of what groups actually believe.

However, I do need to note that this 53% figure is easily the highest of any group. Among white Catholics, just 34% are in the top-right square. In fact, I was struck by how the top-right and bottom-left squares (the latter being pro-pathway and pro-abortion) are pretty evenly distributed for a number of groups. For non-white evangelicals, it’s a five-point difference. For mainliners, it’s a 12-point gap, and for white Catholics, it’s a single percentage point. That’s interesting to me.

It’s also worth flagging that the share of “cross-pressured” people is not that high for many groups. These are individuals who hold two positions that don’t clearly map onto the partisan divide—people who are pro-pathway and anti-abortion, or the reverse. For most groups I looked at, only about one-third of the sample falls into either of these two squares. The orthodoxy of each party does seem to nudge people toward holding “consistent” positions based on mainstream political views.

Now, here’s where it gets a bit more complicated—but hopefully more insightful. I took those four groupings and then calculated the Trump vote share for each of them across policy positions on both immigration and abortion.

Let’s just get two squares out of the way right now. The top right are people who already agree with GOP views—they don’t support a pathway to citizenship and they don’t support access to abortion. Almost all of them voted for Trump. It was 95%+ in many cases. But do note that Black Protestant outlier! And the bottom left are clearly people who align more closely with the Democrats. They support a pathway to citizenship and access to abortion. Almost none of them voted for Trump, either. And also note the white evangelical outlier here, too!

So the real action is the top left (pro-pathway/pro-life) and the bottom right (anti-pathway/pro-choice). Among evangelicals, there’s a ten-point difference in Trump support. The bottom-right category was 77% for Trump. You see that same spread among non-white evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and non-white Catholics, too. Trump did about ten points better among a Christian who was pro-immigrant and pro-life compared to one who was anti-immigrant but pro-choice. That may be pointing to the fact that abortion can move the needle, right?

But this finding is not universal. White Catholics and Latter-day Saints certainly buck this trend. Among white Catholics, Trump did three points better in the bottom-right square compared to the top-left one. For Mormons, the gap was even larger: 21 percentage points. It seems like immigration is the issue activating these two groups.

So I had to put this to a really simple statistical test—a regression. I ran one for each group and used Trump vote as the dependent variable, allowing me to hold constant immigration policy views when looking at abortion support, and vice versa.

You notice that there’s a whole bunch of traditions that are just to the right of center? These are Orthodox Christians, Black Protestants, mainline Protestants, white and non-white evangelicals, and non-white Catholics. Here’s what the result of this regression tells us.

If you take two people from one of these religious groups—one who is pro-life (but supports a pathway to citizenship) and one who is anti-immigrant (but is pro-choice)—the pro-lifer is 9.3 percentage points more likely to vote for Trump. In other words, for this part of the sample, abortion is a significantly stronger “pull” toward the Republican Party than immigration is. Being conservative on abortion does more heavy lifting for Trump than being conservative on the border.

There are two groups that buck this trend, though. One is white Catholics. The model couldn’t find any evidence of either issue being predictive of a Trump vote (that’s why the error bars overlap with zero). The only group where the coefficient ran in a clearly different direction was Latter-day Saints. For them, anti-immigrant sentiment was a stronger predictor of voting for the GOP in 2024 than abortion. I’m going to let someone else try to figure out why that was the case.

So why does this result seem to refute my prior analysis from five years ago? Well, part of it may be that I’m measuring vote choice here. In that previous post, my dependent variable was Trump’s approval rating. I’m of the mind that lots of people can vote for a candidate and then not be huge fans of that person once they’re in office. For instance, what about the “I didn’t vote for Trump, I voted against Harris” crowd?

My plan is to circle back on this when we have good data about approval of Trump when he is halfway through his second term.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.