All those tweets and sometimes nasty bluster might have been enough to weaken the evangelical support for President Trump, possibly causing him to lose the election.
An analysis of religious voters suggests that the president not only didn’t add to his 2016 evangelical corps but lost about 1.6%, winning 79.4%.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, won 18.6% of the key voting group, 2.6% more than Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, according to the analysis of an exit poll commissioned by All Israel News.
Joel C. Rosenberg, who founded the site, told Secrets that while the percentage lost by Trump may look small, it likely represented 720,000 voters. And in states such as Georgia where few votes separate Biden and Trump, it may have been the difference.
“For more than a year, I and others have been warning that if President Trump lost just 1% of evangelical Christians that he would likely lose the White House. Why? There are 60 million evangelicals in the U.S. — 75% of them are white. That’s 45 million people,” said Rosenberg, a popular author who has also been a key unofficial diplomat in Middle East peace efforts
“A loss of 1% would be losing 450,000 votes. Again, why is this important? Because this is the group that went strongest for Trump in 2016. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump that year,” he said, adding, “In 2020, our exit poll found that Trump received only 79.4%. That’s a loss of 1.6 points. That translates into a potential loss of 720,000 voters. In a close race, like this year, those votes could very well be the margin between victory and defeat.”
The survey analysis did not suggest a reason for the slide in support, but Rosenberg did. He said:
“Some evangelicals, not most, by any means, that I interviewed all across the U.S. in recent months told me they simply could not look past what they regard as Trump’s character problems. They criticized, in their words, Trump’s ‘mishandling’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, his ‘inflammatory’ tweets, his ‘disastrous’ and ‘distasteful’ first debate performance, his ‘unkindness’ towards his political rivals and opponents, his perceived ‘dishonesty’ on various topics, his ‘chaotic’ and ‘exhausting’ manner of governance, and his ‘weird’ photo op in front of a church in Washington that had been burned by rioters, to name just a few of their complaints. Some told me they were inclined to sit out the election.”
Before the election, some evangelical leaders also noted that Trump’s tweets and sometimes harsh words turned off supporters, but that most looked past those to focus instead on his support for their issues, including the president’s historically strong backing of anti-abortion initiatives.
“We love 80% of his policies and 20% of his tweets,” said Focus on the Family chief Jim Daly before the election. “Is he a perfect person? No,” he told Secrets shortly before the GOP convention, but added, “I think we’ve grown in the Christian community to recognize policy. Policy is what counts, what gets done.”
Rosenberg’s survey also found that the Catholic vote split 49.9% for Trump, 48.2% for Biden, who is a Catholic himself.
Biden also won Jews, 71.7% to Trump’s 27.7%, an increase from 24% in 2016.
And Biden took 34.5% of the pro-life vote to Trump’s 63.6% despite the Democratic ticket’s support for abortion-on-demand and taxpayer funding of abortions.
