2024 Election Post-Mortem: How Did Evangelicals Vote?
(ANALYSIS) What in the world happened in the 2024 presidential election?
It’s a question I’ve been asked by dozens of media outlets over the last six months. But I had a big problem: no reliable data that would aid me in answering such a question.
The exit polls, no matter what anyone tells you, should not be considered gospel. There are a number of fundamental flaws in their design that make it impossible to rely on them to construct an accurate portrayal of what actually happened on election day. Their real purpose? To fill air time on election night while the major networks wait for the results to pile again across the United States.
But all that’s changed now, and my goal over the next couple of months is to tell the story of the campaign between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris using data from the newly released Cooperative Election Study.
This survey indicates that 22% of all American adults align with an evangelical denomination. Seventeen percent of the sample are White evangelicals, and just over 5% are non-White evangelicals. Among those non-White evangelicals, 38% were Black and 28% were Hispanic.
Let’s start by visualizing the results of the last five presidential elections among those three groups of evangelicals.
It should come as no surprise that evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in 2024, because they gave him a tremendous amount of support in both 2016 and 2020. But it’s noteworthy that Trump continued to make inroads among evangelicals — his share of the vote went from 70% to 75% in the last three elections.
The Democrats have not done well at all with evangelicals. Their best effort was in 2012, when Obama got 30% of their votes. Harris did slightly worse than Biden — 23% vs 25%. But it’s notable that Biden got the same share of the evangelical vote as Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Of course, Trump’s real base of support is specifically among White evangelicals. In 2016, Trump’s vote share was no different than McCain in 2008 or Romney’s in 2012 — about 77%. But in 2020, Trump ran up the score just a bit, garnering 81% of the White evangelical vote.
The data from 2024 says he continued to win over the White evangelical vote at 83% — the highest on record.
However, the breakdown of the non-White evangelical vote may tell the story of the 2024 election when it comes to religion. Republicans have historically struggled with this group of voters.
In 2008, Obama enjoyed an 18 point advantage and that expanded dramatically in the next couple of election cycles. In 2012, the non-White evangelical vote was D+30, and it was D+25 in 2016. But then in 2020, Trump managed to make some inroads, getting back to 40% and narrowing the gap to 18 points.
But look at 2024 — a huge shift. The non-White evangelical vote was essentially split in 2024 — Harris 49% and Trump at 48%. Harris lost at least 10 points with this constituency — a huge blow.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.