Washington Examiner, April 2024
Former President Donald Trump is about to go to trial over criminal allegations he paid off a porn star before the 2016 election. But instead of being deterred, support from white evangelical Protestant Christians could win him the 2024 cycle over President Joe Biden.
In 2020, white evangelicals accounted for roughly 1 in 5 general election voters and a third of the people who cast a ballot for Trump. Without their support, Biden would have won that contest by more than 20 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Center.
But although Trump grew his margin of victory with the demographic in 2020 against Biden, compared to four years earlier against then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the former president appears to be mindful of the group’s importance eight months before Election Day. “Nov. 5 is going to be called something else. You know what it’s going to be called? Christian Visibility Day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before,” Trump told a crowd this week during a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “Let’s call it Christian Visibility Day.”
White evangelicals are a key component of Trump’s coalition, according to Costas Panagopoulos, chairman of political science at Northeastern University, as the former president promises to establish a federal task force to counter what he describes as anti-Christian bias within the federal government, particularly within the FBI, and to restrict federal funding for public schools that promote sexual content to children.
