Donald Trump’s fate in the GOP presidential contest in 2024 may hinge on his ability to maintain the surprisingly broad support he received in 2016 from an unexpected group of Republican voters.
The enormous amount of votes Trump received from White evangelical Christians, who many observers thought to oppose a twice-divorced New Yorker who had previously indicated support for abortion rights, was probably the biggest surprise in Trump’s march to the GOP nomination in 2016.
Trump’s accomplishment in forging a new fracture line in the GOP primary electorate was critical to that breakthrough. Historically, there has been a significant gap among Republican voters between those who identify as evangelical Christians and those who do not.
However, Trump divided the GOP electorate further along educational lines in 2016, garnering strong support from voters without a four-year college degree, whether or not they identified as evangelical Christians. Trump’s large majorities among non-college evangelicals were important in allowing him to win a slew of culturally conservative states, particularly in the South, that Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump’s main opponent on the right in 2016, had expected to push him to the nomination.
Those blue-collar evangelical Christians may be even more crucial to Trump’s chances in 2024.
Early 2024 GOP presidential preference polls indicate that Trump’s support among Republicans with a four-year college degree, including both evangelical Christians and those who do not, may be much poorer than in 2016.
Because of this scepticism, Trump will likely need to boost his support among non-college Republicans, who have historically been his most passionate supporters, in order to stave off a challenge from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among others, in a field of indeterminate size. In many Republican primaries, a sizable proportion, if not a majority, of non-college GOP voters identify as evangelical Christians.
With some prominent evangelical figures openly suggesting that the GOP should move on from Trump in 2024, the former president will struggle to build a winning primary coalition if he cannot replicate the elevated level of blue-collar evangelical support he achieved in his stunning race to the nomination in 2016.
Evangelical White Protestants have been progressively declining in society as a whole: the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute will place them at slightly under one-seventh of the adult population, down from nearly one-fourth in 2006. However, they continue to be a significantly larger part of the GOP coalition.
According to PRRI research, roughly one-third of Republican partisans identify as evangelical Christians. White evangelicals made up over two-fifths of the potential GOP primary voters in a recent poll conducted for The Bulwark, a conservative website, according to veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres.
According to a cumulative analysis of the 2016 exit polls by AWN polling director Jennifer Agiesta, White evangelical or born-again voters comprised just over half of GOP primary voters in 2016, with non-White evangelicals contributing another few percentage points, according to Edison Research for a consortium of media organisations including AWN. (That cumulative analysis found evangelicals to be a larger share of the GOP vote than those other sources, which is likely due to two factors: first, it asks voters whether they consider themselves evangelical or “born again,” which captures a few points of Catholics who identify as born again, and second, the competitive primary states in which exit polls were conducted in 2016 leaned more heavily towards the South than other regions where evangelicals are less plentiful.
The divide between evangelical Christians and non-evangelical Christians was the most critical dynamic in the two contentious GOP presidential primaries that preceded Trump’s victory in 2016.
Both the 2008 and 2012 Republican presidential primaries were eventually decided by a struggle between one candidate who relied mostly on evangelical Christian support (Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012) and one who relied primarily on non-evangelicals (John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012). According to cumulative analyses of exit polls conducted by Gary Langer of ABC News, the non-evangelical candidate won the nomination with an almost identical pattern of support: both McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 won about half of the non-evangelical GOP primary voters, allowing them to prevail despite winning only about one-third of those who did identify as evangelicals.
In those prior campaigns, education had begun to emerge as a significant dividing line: Romney, for example, had won more states with college-educated voters than with non-college voters. However, whether voters were evangelicals or not remained the most crucial determinant in those early campaigns. In the pivotal 2008 South Carolina primary, for example, McCain received a substantially higher share of non-evangelical voters than evangelicals, with only minor disparities between those with and without college degrees in each category. The evangelical split was significantly more powerful than the educational divide in determining support for Romney, Santorum, and Newt Gingrich, the three main contenders, in the 2012 South Carolina primary.
In 2016, Trump shifted the axis. He made education the most essential aspect in the race for voters. That educational fault line ran across virtually every state and practically every important constituency, including evangelical Christians. The dynamic of education levels supplanting evangelical affiliation as the primary divider among Republican voters was “unique to Trump,” according to Jim Guth, a political scientist at Furman University in South Carolina. “You don’t usually see that type of split among Republican candidates.”
While McCain and Romney were quite strong among non-evangelical voters and fairly weak among evangelicals, Trump’s support did not differ as much between those two groups. Instead, Trump regularly performed considerably better among voters without a four-year college degree than among those with one, whether or not they were evangelicals, in critical 2016 contests.
Because those without degrees voted more like other blue-collar Republicans than white-collar evangelicals, Trump was able to counteract Cruz’ predicted advantage among evangelicals in 2016. According to Ayres, the GOP pollster, “the education split” among Republican voters has been “a greater predictor of Donald Trump’s strength than the evangelical/non-evangelical divide.”
The most critical aspect was how that trend played out in South Carolina, which has voted for the eventual winner in every GOP primary save one since 1980. (in 2012 when Gingrich unexpectedly carried the state.) It was vital to Cruz’ aspirations of defeating Trump because evangelicals make up such a sizable portion of the vote there. But Trump easily won it, despite the fact that exit polls showed he only carried 22% of college-educated evangelicals there; the main reason was that he won twice as many evangelicals without a degree (44%), an even larger share than he won among non-college voters who were not evangelicals, according to exit polls.
Even after Trump’s victory in South Carolina, Cruz’s campaign stated openly that they intended to resurrect their campaign by defeating the New Yorker in the forthcoming slate of Southern races where evangelical Christians traditionally make up the bulk of GOP primary voters. Instead, exit surveys revealed that Trump outperformed Cruz among non-college White evangelicals in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, as well as Michigan, and tied with them in Arkansas and Missouri. That strength was key to Trump winning all of those states and the nomination quite easily.
According to Agiesta’s aggregate analysis of 2016 exit polls, Trump won only 32% of all evangelicals with a college degree across all disputed states in 2016. Trump, on the other hand, carried 45% of all evangelicals without a college degree. That was enough to give Trump a tiny plurality of the total White evangelical vote, “to the amazement of practically everyone,” according to longtime Republican evangelical strategist Ralph Reed.
Trump’s high support among non-evangelicals without a degree, combined with his strong support among non-evangelicals without a degree, was enough to propel him to a convincing victory, despite his recurrent deficit among college-educated Republican voters (whether or not they identified as evangelicals).
Early signs indicate that education will remain a significant fault line in the GOP presidential election in 2024, notably among evangelical voters. According to Ayres, in a recent 2024 poll he conducted for The Bulwark, Trump ran about even with DeSantis among non-college evangelicals when the two were matched with a large field of potential contenders, while DeSantis comfortably led the former president among both college-educated evangelicals and non-evangelicals with and without a degree.
Another Republican polling firm, Echelon Insights, compiled the findings of its 2024 GOP primary polls from November through January for me. In that poll, Trump drew nearly half of non-college White evangelicals despite being in a wide field (and comfortably leading DeSantis with them, a better showing than Ayres found). However, the firm discovered that Trump was only winning around one-fourth of college-educated evangelicals and behind DeSantis among them. According to Nolan Combs, the firm’s research director, Trump attracted almost three-fifths of non-college evangelicals, while DeSantis garnered roughly three-fifths of college educated evangelicals. According to PRRI, Trump’s favorability rating among non-college White Republican evangelicals is 17 percentage points higher than among those with a degree.
According to PRRI research, nearly three-fourths of the total White evangelical Protestant population does not have a college degree; however, because college educated voters turn out in greater numbers, the balance is somewhat closer in the GOP primary, with the non-college side representing around 55% of the total White evangelical vote, according to exit poll analysis. Nonetheless, the exit poll analysis indicated that evangelicals without a degree represent a greater proportion of Republican primary voters than either evangelicals with a degree or non-evangelicals with or without one. That implies that, if Trump can keep them, they will provide him with a formidable base for all of his other tasks.
Can he? According to a recent national poll conducted by PRRI, large majorities of non-college White evangelical Republicans express many of the cultural and racial worries that Trump has exploited throughout his political career. According to unpublished PRRI results provided to AWN, seventy percent or more of those non-college evangelicals agreed that discrimination against Whites is now as serious as bias against minorities; that the growing number of immigrants threatens American customs and values; and that society is becoming too soft and feminine. Seventy percent of non-college evangelical Republicans “strongly” backed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. According to the poll, there were significantly fewer college-educated White evangelicals who held each of these beliefs.
“The politics of grievance has a stronger appeal to individuals without a college degree,” said PRRI founder and president Robert P. Jones.
Nonetheless, the proportion of college-educated White evangelicals who agree with Trump’s key cultural beliefs is far greater than the proportion who favour Trump himself in 2024. Ayres, like others I spoke with, feels the divide between college and non-college White evangelical Republicans is explained less by diverse opinions on issues and more by divergent reactions to Trump’s bellicose demeanour. “I think it’s a combination of style, attitude, and an anti-establishment approach as much as specific cultural issues associated to evangelical support, such as being pro-life on abortion or anti-gay marriage,” Ayres said. “It’s culturally and economically anti-establishment, populist if you will.”
Guth believes DeSantis, who has a slightly more buttoned-down (if only slightly less aggressive) approach than Trump, is ideally suited to attract college-educated Republican supporters, particularly evangelicals, “who don’t like the Trump manner even though they accept the Trump policies.” Guth believes that because DeSantis is “already waging the cultural wars” in a way that proves his social conservative credentials, “the middle and higher middle class evangelical types will undoubtedly find him more appealing than Trump, especially after the events of January 6.”
Dave Wilson, president and executive director of the Palmetto Family Council, South Carolina’s most prominent social conservative organisation, sees an opening for DeSantis or other alternatives to Trump forming, less on educational than generational lines. “You have a set of folks who are populist supporters of Donald Trump,” he remarked. “However, I keep seeing other groups say, ‘We are searching for a new standard bearer of the conservative message—someone who can take that beyond the next eight years to the next two or three decades.'”
However, if DeSantis runs, he may face the same problem as Trump’s opponents in 2016: while Trump consolidated blue-collar Republicans to an astonishing extent in a crowded field, college-educated Republicans (whether evangelical or not) never coalesced behind a single alternative; ultimately, they split their vote among too many competitors to decide the outcome. On paper, several of the other Republicans contemplating a run in 2024, including Nikki Haley, Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, Glenn Youngkin, Mike Pompeo, and Tim Scott, look to be better positioned to recruit college-educated voters than to capture significant numbers of non-college voters from Trump.
To prevent Trump from winning another divide-and-conquer election, another candidate will almost probably need to break through Trump’s barriers among Republicans without a college degree, especially blue-collar evangelical Christians. The problem for the remainder of the GOP field – and the party itself – will be to connect with those voters without taking absolutist stances on cultural issues that alienate the socially moderate white-collar suburbanites who have provided decisive support for Democrats during the Trump era. “That’s the conundrum: can someone win the Republican nomination and then win the general election?” Guth said. “Winning both, it seemed to me, is not an easy feat, and it is becoming more difficult as time passes.”
