By Will Hall
ALEXANDRIA – In a stunning repudiation of a corps of anti-Trump evangelical leaders, evangelical voters overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, with 81 percent of white evangelicals voting for him and only 16 percent pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton.
But Trump also won 58 percent of all Protestant voters and 52 percent of all Catholics.
Even conservative women backed Trump, with 78 percent voting for him and only 18 percent backing Clinton.
Now, a recently released study by the Family Research Council, a Christian public policy ministry based in Washington, D.C., indicates the abortion issue and concern about the political leanings of the courts were key factors in why evangelicals voted for Trump, thus rejecting #NeverTrump evangelical leaders.
OUT OF TOUCH
Leading up to Nov. 8, the mainstream media had used the #NeverTrump effort by a segment of the religious establishment to suggest it revealed a deep division among the evangelical faithful.
The New York Times ran a headline Oct. 17, only three weeks out from the election, claiming “Donald Trump Reveals Evangelical Rifts That Could Shape Politics For Years.” In the article the flagship of the mainstream media claimed Trump was underperforming among evangelicals, garnering as little as 65 percent of their vote.
Even LifeWay Research, a division of the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources, ran a much discussed study, Oct. 14, with the headline, “2016 Election Exposes Evangelical Divides,” claiming only 45 percent of “Americans with Evangelical Beliefs” would vote for Trump and that 31 percent were throwing their support behind Clinton.
Christianity Today, which denounced Trump in a separate harsh editorial, used the LifeWay survey to claim in its headline, “Most Evangelicals Are Not Voting Trump.”
But, historical data shows Trump’s support by 81 percent of white evangelicals was higher than the support of this voting bloc for past presidential candidates Mitt Romney (78 percent) and John McCain (74 percent), and even bested George W. Bush’s favorability with this group (64 percent, 2000, and 78 percent, 2004) – and Bush won both his elections.
Importantly, the projected 130 million votes cast in 2016 (using CNN projections) will top the nearly 129 million ballots counted in 2008 (as certified by the U.S. Electoral College) when President Obama became the first Black president in U.S. history. With evangelicals composing 26 percent of the voters then and now, this also means more evangelicals voted in 2016 than ever before.
ON THE MARK
The FRC commissioned survey, conducted by Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research, found that nearly 6 in 10 Trump voters (59 percent) said the fact that the Republican Party platform “includes strong positions on unborn human life and religious liberty” caused them to cast their ballots for him.
Interestingly, about three-fourths of Trump’s supporters (72 percent) said they believed marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman, and, two-thirds of all voters said the government should let people who hold this belief to be free to express it in how “they live their daily lives and in the way they run their businesses.”
There also was majority support (53 percent to 37 percent) among all voters for removing restrictions on free speech from the pulpit, allowing churches and nonprofits “to speak freely on all issues, including on behalf or in opposition to any candidate for public office.”
Louisiana native and FRC President Tony Perkins summed up the survey’s results, saying it was the Republican Party’s platform “that brokered the deal between Trump and Christian conservatives.”
Perkins said the deal was sealed in the final debate “when Trump vividly described a partial-birth abortion and pledged to appoint pro-life justices.”
“The Republican Party platform played a key role in bringing Christian conservatives and Trump together,” he concluded.
Read Richard Land’s column on why some SBC leaders are in the #Never Trump camp: http://christianexaminer.com/article/why-so-many-calvinists-in-the-never-trump-movement/51201.htm
