Dramatic election ends with historic victory for Donald Trump.
Exit polls suggest that “Never Trump” was never a likely outcome for white evangelical voters, who showed up to support President-elect Donald Trump at their highest margin since 2004.
Despite reservations expressed by many evangelical and Republican leaders, white born-again/evangelical Christians cast their ballots for the controversial real estate mogul-turned-politician at an 81 percent to 16 percent margin over Hillary Clinton.
Evangelicals of color—who represent 2 in 5 evangelicals, but aren’t segmented out in most national political polls—largely preferred Clinton leading up to the election. But she ultimately underperformed among Hispanics and African Americans compared to President Barack Obama before her.
“The story here continues to be continuity in the strength of evangelical support for GOP candidates, rather than greater intensity,” said Kevin den Dulk, political science professor at Calvin College. “I suspect there’s some underlying changes in polling responses that would make Trump’s evangelical support seem greater than it has in the past.”
As a wave of disappointed voters announced on Twitter that Trump’s election has led them to drop the label evangelical, den Dulk speculated that evangelical believers who voted for Clinton may have been less likely to identify that way in exit polls, widening the born-again gap between the two candidates.
While Clinton’s campaign largely ignored evangelical outreach (unlike Obama), Trump spent much of the months leading up to Election Day directly courting evangelical support. Those voters—particularly in battleground states such as Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida—proved to be one of …
