Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden have yet won their party’s respective nominations. But Super Tuesday, the most delegate-heavy day of the primary, put the two within touching distance of a rematch as Trump’s only remaining competitor, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race.
The same crowd of white evangelical voters who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020 appear poised to support him in 2024; Trump took 8 in 10 white evangelical voters in Super Tuesday states like California and North Carolina and more than three-quarters in states like Virginia.
For the minority of “Never Trump” evangelicals, his ascendancy further reinforces their alienation from the Republican Party and, sometimes, from the evangelical Christian circles in which they have spent their lives.
“For evangelicals, the era of ‘Trump is our last choice’ is over. Now is the era of “Trump is our first choice,” said David French, a New York Times columnist, told CT.
The last time there was a competitive Republican Party primary, he remembers evangelicals making a binary argument: It’s either Trump or a Democrat. The gist of the argument was to “hold one’s nose” and vote for the lesser of two evils.
French, who spent most of his career as a lawyer working on religious freedom issues, said the idea that evangelicals only begrudgingly support Trump is no longer compelling. Voters rejected several other GOP options as the primary season progressed, from former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to former Gov. from New Jersey Chris Christie, among others.
Many Republicans who still supported Haley on Super Tuesday said in exit polls that they considered their vote to be “against Trump”. But Trump’s evangelical supporters, on the other hand, were motivated by the candidate himself, saying the former president fights for people like them and shares their values.
“Many evangelicals see Donald Trump as a fighter for their problems and are able to dissociate Donald Trump, the person, from Donald Trump, the president,” said Daniel Bennett, a political science professor at John Brown University.
But another portion of the Church’s membership, he said, “may find that they are no longer as welcome in evangelical circles because of their dissatisfaction with Donald Trump.”
French is an active member of a segment of conservative evangelicals who find Trump even more distasteful than he did seven years ago.
“In 2024, Donald Trump lost, lied about the election, started a violent uprising at the Capitol, and then ran again against many Republicans, including rising star Republicans,” he said . “And he’s not just the choice of the overwhelming majority of Republicans, he’s the choice of the overwhelming majority of evangelicals.”
Half or more of Super Tuesday Republican voters in North Carolina and Virginia said Biden did not legitimately win in 2020, according to CBS News exit polls.
Trump’s legal problems don’t seem to hurt him: He has been indicted in four criminal cases at the state and federal level. So far, he faces 91 criminal charges related to his attempt to stay in power after the 2020 elections, his attempts to interfere in the 2020 elections in Georgia, his manipulation of classified government documents after leaving his functions and falsification of business records to cover up a sex scandal. in 2016.
A analysis speak Times found that after Trump was first indicted in March, he went from an average of $129,000 per day to more than $778,000 per day. After the first indictment, Trump’s national polling average jumped up. (Subsequent indictments do not appear to have had the same positive impact on his poll numbers.)
John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University and editor-in-chief of Current, says the loyalty to Trump underscores a shift that became evident in 2016—that evangelicals will prioritize policy victories over character .
“What the primary has shown me so far is consistent with the argument that I’ve been making since 2016 that, you know, the era of character in evangelical politics is over,” Fea said. “What white evangelicals see is a guy who’s going to fight for them, even if you don’t go to a MAGA rally or wear a red hat.”
Even with some changes in what it means to be evangelical — political scientist Ryan Burge notes that now more than a quarter of people who choose that label rarely attend church — Trump still has a firm hold on many Sunday morning regulars.
Trump’s critics are accused of sounding like a broken record. And sometimes Fea feels like she’s already said everything. His 2018 book Believe me: the evangelical road to Donald Trump explored the reasons why a majority of white evangelicals hitched their wagon to Trump, motivated, according to Fea, by a mixture of fear, power and nostalgia, and prepared to do so by “backyard evangelicals” who are brought closer to the corridors of power by supporting Atout.
Fea plans to vote for Biden. In the meantime, he’s trying to do what he can “to get people to see that this guy is bad for the country, but he’s also really damaging the witness of the Church.”
After 2020, 43 percent of evangelicals expressed concerns that the embrace of Trump by Christians had damaged the credibility of the Church. More than a third of evangelicals said Christian leaders’ support of Trump made it harder to share the gospel with others.
Fea said he — and other Never Trump supporters — “hope and trust the American people, especially independent voters who make up the majority of voters, to defeat him in November.”
Both Trump and Biden face challenges when it comes to independent voterswho have shown significant disapproval of their White House records.
Napp Nazworth, director of the American Values Coalition and former political editor of the Christian Post, believes that most Never Trumpers will choose to write about a candidate or vote for Biden.
“My perspective hasn’t changed since 2016. It’s interesting to see how others have changed,” Nazworth said. “(Trump) now has even stronger support than he did.”
French also has no intention of toning down the criticism. “My job is not to shrug my shoulders and go with the flow,” he said. “The job is to tell the truth, as best you can discern the truth.”
Many of his critics on the right complain when the shots are directed within the party rather than at Democrats. According to French, the criticism is often that “if there’s a much less powerful and influential person on the left who might be behaving badly, they say, ‘Why don’t you talk about that person instead of Trump?’ »
French is not convinced: “If Trump is the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, one of the most politically and culturally influential people in the United States, not talking about him is professional misconduct. »
Trump’s role as standard-bearer is increasingly clear after Tuesday’s election, where 31 states held primaries and caucuses. Republicans have allocated 365 delegates for their convention in 15 races for the GOP presidential nomination. Democrats allocated 1,420.
Haley, the South Carolina Methodist who lasted the longest as a Republican alternative to Trump, only won Vermont on Super Tuesday. Rather than supporting her opponent, she disputed Trump to gain the trust of his supporters.
“It’s like a sequel that no one wants,” said Dan Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
But he sees a glimmer of hope in the continued division. He hopes that this can lead to an awareness within and around the Church of their political commitment. Most of his speeches this year focus on how to properly manage the election season.
Darling believes Christian leaders are proactive: “They want to teach their people how to face this season, how to exercise good citizenship, how to stay united as a people. This is a key element.
Meanwhile, Trump and Biden appeared to have already moved on from the general election, with each pointing the finger at the other.
Trump’s victory speech at Mar-a-Lago painted a picture of an America in dire straits under Biden’s presidency, denouncing the twin disasters of immigration and inflation.
“Our cities are dying of suffocation. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying,” he said. “In a way, we are a third world country.”
Biden, meanwhile, said in a written campaign statement that Tuesday’s results leave Americans with a “clear choice” between him and the former GOP president: “Are we going to continue to move forward or are we going to allow Donald Trump to drag us back into chaos? , the division and obscurity that defined his mandate?
