What Role Did Evangelicals Play in the 2024 Republican Primary?

Before I get to the data, a couple housekeeping things:

1. Don’t forget that I am offering a discount on subscriptions through December 25th - $40 for the year. You can take advantage through this link.

2. I am doing some speaking events in early 2025 and I have some flexibility in my schedule to add another engagement. If you are interested in having me speak at your church/small group/ministry/etc. on the following dates, I can give you a pretty hefty discount and you wouldn’t have to pay for travel. They are:

   
   Dallas-Fort Worth. Either the night of February 5 or February 6.
   Kansas City. Either the night of February 27 or the afternoon of February 28.
   
   If you are interested, just use this Speaker Request Form.

3. Tony Jones and I are in the middle of a 3 year Templeton Grant. We’ve conducted multiple surveys of the nones. The title of our project is Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America. We need to set up a domain to house a lot of that information, including an interactive survey that will let people know what type of none they are. We need your help in choosing a domain name. Please vote on your favorite option.

And after all that - onto the post.

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I feel like we are just in a perpetual election cycle now. As soon as all the ballots are counted from November 5, there will probably be a handful of Democrats and Republicans who begin to form exploratory committees that would set the stage for them running for the White House in 2028. Today, I am especially interested in what is happening with the Republican party in a post-Trump America.

Yes, I am assuming that he will not try to seek a third term in office, which I know is not a foregone conclusion. However, it is unlikely given that pesky 22nd Amendment. But I have some data that offer a little bit of a window into who evangelicals might vote for when Trump’s name is not on the primary ballot.

The Associated Press has a project that they call VoteCast, which does a whole lot of exit polling during election cycles. It gets a lot of notoriety on election night, but they also managed to field surveys in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina right after each stated voted in the primary. I downloaded the data, and wanted to show you how white evangelicals navigated that process and how that compared to other voters in the Republican primary.

Let me start by just showing you what percentage of each of those three states primary voters identified as white and evangelical.

According to PRRI, the share of all Americans who are white evangelicals is about 14%. The Republican voters in both South Carolina and Iowa are much more evangelical than the population as a whole. In fact, in both states, at least a third of those who participated in the Republican primary were white evangelicals. The big outlier here was New Hampshire - just a tenth of their primary voters were white evangelical.

But who did those white evangelicals actually vote for? What makes this difficult is that Iowa was the only instance in which there was a pretty wide open field of options. For instance, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race on January 22nd - two days before voters went to the polls in New Hampshire. Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out a week before that. So, it was a two person race after Iowa.

So, according to this data, it looks like Trump got a majority of white evangelicals votes in Iowa (51%). That was just slightly better than Trump did among all Iowa caucus goers at 47%. Haley was clearly in second place, but she was more palatable among non-evangelical Republicans than evangelicals (22% vs 18%). I don’t know if I would have guessed this but DeSantis did no better (or worse) among evangelicals than the rest of Republican voters and Ramaswamy may have been slightly stronger among the evangelical crowd.

By the time New Hampshire held their primary, the field had winnowed down to two. Even though Joe Biden refused to put his name on the ballot in the state to comply with party rules, he still got 18% of the vote as a write-in candidate. But even excluding that, Trump was a huge favorite in the state—earning nearly 70% of the white evangelical vote compared to only 25% for Nikki Haley.

In South Carolina, it was just a two person race and Trump had a commanding lead. He got 70% of white evangelical voters, compared to only 56% of all voters who cast a ballot in the primary. This is pretty compelling evidence that Haley had some decent support outside the white evangelical wing of the Republican party. Of course, you need a lot of white evangelical votes to win anything as a member of the GOP, but Haley did make some inroads with this group.

But let’s take this a step further and try to figure out what factors drove up Haley’s support among primary voters. So, I broke the sample down into four levels of education and then looked at how each of them voted in the Republican primary.

There is an incredibly significant education divergence in this data. As Donald Trump once said, “he loved the poorly educated” and they loved him, too. He got a majority of the votes cast by folks who earned no more than a high school diploma. However, that was especially large among white evangelicals with a low level of education—he got nearly three-quarters of their votes

As education rises, there is a clear shift in voting patterns: Trump does worse and Haley does better. That’s true among all voters, all white voters, and all white evangelical voters. Among voters with graduate degrees, Haley did twice as well as Trump (48% vs. 22%). But what is really headline-grabbing is white evangelicals with graduate degrees - a majority voted for Haley (52%). However, she did a whole lot worse with those who had a four year degree only garnering 32% of their votes.

Let me throw age into the mix, as well. Was Trump running up the score with older voters but losing ground with young Republicans in the primary?

There is one part of this graph that just pops off the screen - the folks in the sample who were between the ages of 18 and 29. For all three groups of voters (all, only white, only white evangelicals), Trump does noticeably better when compared to older age groups. Among young white evangelicals, Trump got 66% of their votes compared to only 16% who voted for Haley. Among all primary voters, Trump got 54% of young adults compared to 20% for Haley.

What also strikes me about this is how little age matters once you get to thirty years old. Among all primary voters in 2024, Trump got the exact same share of people who in their thirties as voters who were of retirement age. There was a small age gradient among white evangelicals, but even then the variation from one age bucket to the next is incredibly small. While Trump did slightly better with the youth, I think it’s fair to say that age didn’t play a huge role.

I also wanted to analyze a series of questions in the AP data that asked about some of Trump’s actions after the November 2020 election. Voters were asked about three specific instances:

• His alleged attempt to interfere in the vote count in the 2020 election.

• His role in what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6

• The classified documents found at his Florida home.

Response options were: Trump did something illegal, Trump did something unethical but not illegal, or Trump did nothing wrong.

Among all primary voters and all white primary voters they were evenly split over the question about interfering with the vote count in states like Georgia. About 38% of each sample thought he did something illegal and the same share believed that he did nothing wrong. However, white evangelicals were clearly the outlier here. Just 21% believed he had committed a crime and a majority (51%) said he did nothing wrong.

In terms of his actions surrounding January 6, the primary voters clearly trended toward a belief that Trump did nothing wrong. About four in ten primary voters took this position. However, again, white evangelicals were much more likely to give Trump a pass. In this data, just 16% of them believed what Trump did was a crime and a majority (53%) said that he did nothing wrong.

What about those boxes of classified documents in his Florida home? It’s interesting that a smaller share of voters believed he did nothing wrong (only 30% of all primary voters). Even a majority of white evangelicals weren’t willing to give Trump a pass on this - 21% said he committed a crime and another 37% described his actions as only unethical, not illegal.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t throw this one last piece of data into the mix. It asked people, “How important is politics to your personal identity?”

Among all primary voters, just 6% said that politics was 'extremely' important, and another 16% said it was 'very' important. That was the same share who said that it was ‘not at all’ important to their identity. And notice how little this varies across the three groups I analyzed here. Among white evangelicals, it’s not like a huge chunk of them are completely wrapped up in politics.

One thing that I have to constantly remind my students about is the fact that very few people think about politics as much as they do. The average voter barely pays attention to what is happening day to day. They tend to consume political news with more frequency in the run-up to an election. But they aren’t watching hours of cable news every day. And you shouldn’t either.

What does this tell us about the possible Republican field in 2028? I am pretty convinced that Haley has a hard ceiling in the GOP primary. She didn’t seem to make any real inroads with evangelicals. She struggled with voters at the bottom end of the education spectrum. She didn’t really connect with younger Republicans, either. Of course things can shift in the next four years, but it seems like she has a pretty hard cap on her favorability. That will make it much more difficult to mount a successful primary in a couple of years.

Code for this post can be found here.