Polling Shows a Decline in Support for Trump by Evangelicals, Compared to Romney 4 Years Ago
This morning, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat speculated on Twitter that polling in Georgia shows that evangelicals are supporting Donald Trump at a lower rate than they did Mitt Romney back in 2012.
Back to Georgia: State is 40% evangelical. Romney got 53 percent. If Trump's in the high 30s, he *has* to be bleeding evangelical votes.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 8, 2016
While there’s no way to prove that empirically, it’s possible to take a look at polling to see if that might be the case.
In an AJC poll conducted in October 2012, Mitt Romney led Barack Obama 51% to 43% among likely voters. Republicans favored Romney 90% to 5%. White protestant evangelicals were less enthusiastic. For that subgroup, Romney led President Obama by a margin of 82% to 12%. I don’t believe there were exit polls that year (What, Georgia a battleground state? Nah.) so this poll from mid-October is likely the closest we’ll get. And, as Douthat points out, 53% of voters ended up pulling the lever for Romney in November.
Now, let’s look at the AJC’s August poll released over the weekend. In the poll question that included all four presidential candidates (Clinton, Trump, Johnson and Stein), Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump 43% to 39% among registered voters. This is apparently the poll question Douthat is working from. Breaking it down, 4% of Republican voters support Clinton, while 81% support Trump. Trump’s numbers deteriorate more when looking at evangelicals. There, 13% support Clinton, while only 73% support Trump.
Based on these numbers, then, support by evangelicals for the Republican presidential candidate has declined by nine points.
As a side note, it’s interesting to see that in both 2012 and 2016, the polls had support by Republicans for their nominee eight points higher than support by evangelicals for the Republican candidate. This is similar to the way support for House Bill 857, the religious liberty bill, broke out. In a May AJC poll, 58% of Republicans opposed Governor Deal’s veto of the measure, while only 53% of evangelicals did. Overall opposition to the veto was 44%. When those surveyed were asked if the legislature should try to pass the legislation in 2017, 57% of Republicans said yes and 51% of evangelicals said yes, while only 40% of all those polled agreed.
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Jon Richards
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Well, my wife and I are two of those evangelicals that refuse to vote for him so this isn’t hard to believe. When people ask me why I refuse to vote for Trump this is my short answer;
“I wake up every morning with the single goal of raising my son to not be a jackass. I refuse to tell him when he is older that I voted for the world’s largest jackass.” It’s that simple.
I don’t know if I can buy into your analysis, Jon.
You say “support by evangelicals for the Republican presidential candidate has declined by nine points” without noting that overall goper support has declined as well. In fact, evangelical support is at 90 percent of overall goper support in both the Trump and Romney comparisons, and for Deal’s veto too.
I don’t see how that disproves Douthat’s thesis. that evangelical support for the nominee has declined since 2012. Had the premise been that evangelical support declined relative to the Republican base, that would be a different question, but that’s not what was asked. I think it’s fair to say that support for the third party candidates accounts for some of the bleeding.
Maybe it’s just a matter of interpretation but if someone claims Trump is bleeding votes within a group, I take him to mean he’s losing a disproportionate number of voters in that group. For example, I think we’d all agree that Trump is bleeding support among single women.
But that’s not the case among evangelicals according to the numbers cited. They aren’t any more against Trump than they were against Romney. You can explain their decline in support simply by looking at the overall decline in support among gopers. If Trump can push his current 81 percent closer to Romney’s 90 percent, I’d expect his evangelical support to jump too.