White Christians Favor Trump, Other Religious Groups Lean Toward Biden

Less than a month before the U.S. election, a new Pew Research poll predicts how Christians will vote. 

The data says that White Christians still support Trump over Biden: 78% of evangelicals, 53% of Protestants and 52% of Catholics say they would vote for Trump if the election was today. 

White Christians are the only group that believe this, however. Alternatively, 70% of Jewish voters and 83% of atheist/agnostic voters said they would vote for Biden if the election was today. 

And in a strong divide from White Protestants, 90% of Black Protestants said they would vote for Biden if the election was today. 

The poll was conducted of over 10,000 Americans from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, after the SCOTUS nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and as Donald Trump entered the hospital with Covid-19 on Oct. 2. 

Pew Research Center held a virtual presentation of this information on Thursday for “Faith and the 2020 Elections: A Look at Public Opinion.” They looked at this most recent data and longer trends in religious voters. 

As the Pew panelists noted, and has been the topic of several articles leading up to the election, religious voters are an important demographic to consider in determining who will win elections because they’re one of the largest quantifiable groups with distinct voting patterns. 

Read: Data says Republicans find religion more important than Democrats

In line with the above predictions, unreleased Pew surveys conducted between 2017 and 2020 show that White Christians give a significantly higher job rating to President Trump than the average of all U.S. adults, which was 38% as of August 2020. Black Protestants give a significantly lower job rating to President Trump than the national average.  

Additionally, surveys from May 2016 and Feb. 2020 show that White Christians — including evangelical Protestants, non-evangelical Protestants and Catholics — believe that they are “winning politically.” 

This feeling has increased over the past four years: 63% of White evangelicals said this at the end of Trump’s first term, but only 23% said the same at the end of Obama’s time in office. 

Read: How Pence’s faith gave Trump credibility among conservative Christians

It has been the concern of many journalists on the religion beat how Catholics will vote in the 2020 election — particularly because Joe Biden is a self-proclaimed practicing Catholic. 

Gregory Smith, an associate director of research at Pew, said during the presentation that Biden’s faith has little impact on the vote. 

“Having a candidate at the top of the ticket does not guarantee you can count on Catholic voters,” he said. 

Instead, he said that Catholics as a whole are divided more along party lines than they are religious lines. In the 2020 election, they will instead perform issue-based voting on policies like immigration and abortion.  

Read: Most Catholic voters favor Biden, cite the economy as their biggest concern

More data trends show that White Christians are becoming more Republican, but Black Protestants, Jews, atheists and unaffiliated voters are becoming more Democrat. 

Despite this, White Christians have dropped in their support of President Trump since Pew surveys conducted earlier this Aug. In the summer poll, 59% of White non-evangelical Protestants said they would vote for Trump—a number that has dropped 6% since. 

White evangelicals remain in staunch support of Trump, but support dropped from 83% in August to 78% of voters who intend to vote for Trump this November.