What Role Did Evangelicals Play In The 2024 Republican Primary?
(ANALYSIS) I feel like we are just in a perpetual election cycle now. As soon as all the ballots are counted from Nov. 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 it calls VoteCast, which does a whole lot of exit polling during election cycles. It gets a lot of notoriety on election night, but AP also managed to field surveys in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina right after each state 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 its 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 Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race on Jan. 22 — 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 nonevangelical 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.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.