Quote of the Day: White Evangelicals

Amy Walter has written of a Pew Research assessment of the 2016 electorate.

The first interesting finding is that Trump did worse among white women than what exit polls found. Exit polls suggested 52% voted for Trump, while the Pew data suggests 47%. That's still high, but the second notable point is that being evangelical is by far the strongest predictor of whether a white person supports Trump.

It remains odd to me that very few commentators on the left, when discussing Trump's support among white people, make note of this.

From Walter's piece:

"...Mike Podhorzer, AFL-CIO’s political director, suggests that if we want to have a better understanding of white, non-college educated voters, we need to stop lumping them into one, catch-all category. What really distinguishes a Trump-supporting white voter from one who doesn’t isn’t education or even gender, it's whether or not that voter is evangelical.

Using a data set from Public Religion Research Institute, Podhorzer broke out white voters by gender, education and whether they identified as evangelical. The gap between white voters who approve and disapprove of Trump by gender was 25 points. By education (college versus non-college) it was about the same at 26 percent. But the gap in perceptions of the president between white voters who are evangelical and those who aren’t was a whopping 60 percent!

This evangelical support gap transcends education and gender. For example, among white evangelicals, college-educated men and non-college educated men give Trump equally impressive job approval ratings (78 percent and 80 percent respectively). But, among white men who aren’t evangelical, the education gap is significant. Those without a college degree give Trump a 52 percent job approval rating, while just 40 percent of those with a college degree approve of the job he’s doing."

As I've written before, many evangelicals view Trump as a Christian Cultural Warrior are are quite willing to overlook his many flaws as long as he provides them with big culture war wins.

While some politicians, commentators, and advocates on the left operate as though white Trump voters can be swayed by promoting policies that might better their socioeconomic and health statuses, such as Medicare for All and free college, I'm not sure that's the case with many evangelicals - who have long been motivated by opposition to abortion, LGBT rights, and anything they and their leaders deem "political correctness gone too far."

I'd consider evidence, if presented, that the vast majority of conservative white evangelicals are latent socialists-in-waiting. But right now, I don't buy it.