Trump's Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

BY DANIEL SCHULTZ
OCTOBER 28, 2016

There’s been a lot of discussion (in my Twitter feed, anyway) about religious support for America’s Problem Child. The sentiments run in two general camps: that Trump leads with white religious voters is disgusting, and that it proves that he’s in a good position to win on November 8th.

The first assertion—whatever you think of the value judgment—needs some qualification, and the second is pretty much wishful thinking at this point. Here’s what you need to make sense of the religious vote so far.

PRRI has expanded into more secular-based polling, but they still do good work with religious voters. They recently released a meta-analysis of four of their polls between late September to mid-October, with results as follows:



Not surprisingly, Trump’s strongest support comes from white Evangelicals and his weakest from Hispanics and African-Americans. We’ll talk about the minorities in a minute. Here, let us notice that while Evangelical support for Trump is overwhelming, he’s actually running quite a bit behind Mitt Romney’s 79% and even John McCain’s 73%. He’ll still win the demographic handily, but it won’t do him much good. Trump needs to improve on Romney’s scores with white voters in order to keep up with demographic changes in the US. That is, the nation is becoming steadily browner, and Trump, racist and xenophobic to the end, has dug himself a deep hole with that segment. Where else could he get the votes he needs? With white Evangelicals, who are consistently among the GOP’s core voters. But they’re not behind the Republican nominee like they used to be, which is part of the reason states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas are as close as they are.

http://religiondispatches.org/trumps-lead-with-religious-voters-not-as-bigly-as-you-might-think/

http://www.prri.org/spotlight/religion-vote-2016/