(ANALYSIS) It was the rare Trump quote that caused groans as it rocketed through conservative media.

But this soundbite came from an upcoming memoir from former first lady Melania Trump: “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman's fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes. ... I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

Former President Donald Trump had already softened his party's strong stance against abortion, leading satirists at The Babylon Bee to note: “Pro-Lifers Excited To Choose Between Moderate Amount Of Baby Murder And High Amount Of Baby Murder.”

To put that in ballot-box terms, a new study by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University claimed that 32 million churchgoing Christians are poised to sit out this election — many because they are disillusioned or believe the results will be rigged.

If the number of conservative believers going to the polls plummets, that would clash with trends in the last four White House races, according to political scientist Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, author of “20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America.”

“Half of the Christians are not going to vote. That's normal. That’s old news. ... We can expect those numbers to remain stable,” said Burge, reached by telephone.

But there's another trend researchers expect to see again, he added. Yes, 80% of White evangelicals “voted for John McCain in 2008 and 80% have been voting for Donald Trump. We can expect that to happen again. It’s what they do.”

As for “red” conservative and “blue” liberal voting among Protestants, these trends have been remarkably consistent, wrote Burge in his “Graphs About Religion” Substack newsletter. In a recent post, he parsed 2008-2020 Cooperative Election Study numbers for the 40 largest Protestant denominations.

It wasn't surprising that the “denominations that are most heavily Republican come largely from a handful of families: Pentecostal, nondenominational and Baptist. ... But there are a few that snuck up on me” among the “reddest” churches, wrote Burge, who is a progressive in the American Baptist Churches USA.

It was easy to describe the “blue” end of the spectrum, which consisted of voters from “a lot of historically Black denominations. It’s groups like the Baptist Missionary Association, the Church of God in Christ, the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.” Just above those churches were some “stalwart mainline groups” such as the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.

But a few numbers were surprising.

“The big story for me is the noticeable rightward drift in the voting patterns of the United Methodists. They were 55% for McCain in 2008 and that has just slowly crept up. In both 2016 and 2020 about 61% of United Methodists were Trump supporters,” wrote Burge.

However, with a recent doctrinal split in that denomination, “I would fully expect that the UMC voting bloc would become less red in the 2024 contest.”

Among Presbyterians, voters in the liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) were surprisingly “purple,” with 52% voting for Trump in the past two elections. On the right, 73% of voters in the small Evangelical Presbyterian Church voted for Trump in those elections, while 65% of those from the conservative Presbyterian Church in America voted “red” in 2016 and 64% in 2020. Similar patterns were seen with surprisingly “purple” voters in the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and consistently "red" voting in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

The big trend in American Protestantism is the rapid growth of nondenominational churches, which range from truly fundamentalist congregations to those that are more moderate. Researchers will be watching carefully to spot patterns there, said Burge.

Meanwhile, Latino evangelicals and Pentecostals remain an emerging force in the Republican Party — especially in crucial states such as Georgia, Arizona, Texas and Florida.

“If you think things are going to change in this election, then you have to show me overwhelming evidence for why that will happen,” said Burge. “It’s even the same candidates, when you think about it. Kamala Harris is not the transformational figure that Barack Obama was. She's just the next Democrat, and Trump is still Trump.”

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.