Among the striking features of Donald J. Trump’s victory on November 5 is the emergence of a multi-ethnic coalition of blue-collar and middle-class voters. A key element of this coalition is religious conservatives, among whom evangelicals are a core component. Exit polling in 2024 reveals white evangelical support for Trump at 82 percent (compared with 76 percent in 2020 and 81 percent in 2016). Trump’s strength among evangelicals was sustained despite his increasing pragmatism on the social issues that are many of these voters’ primary motivation. While holding steady with evangelicals, Trump increased his support among religious-conservative swing cohorts such as Catholics and Latino Christians, who likewise, despite his deviations, appear to regard him as a champion of their values. This combination of old and new strengths powered Trump’s winning coalition—and raises the question of whether that coalition will be a lasting one.
Though evangelicals are theologically unified in certain respects, they can be divided sociologically into three categories: Jacksonians, who generally exhibit low social capital; Tocquevillians, who exhibit high social capital; and elites, who live at the heights of American culture. As in 2016 and 2020, Trump carried the Jacksonians and Tocquevillians while losing the elites.
His appeal to Jacksonians is longstanding and shows no sign of abating. A central figure in Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir of Vice President–Elect JD Vance, is “Mamaw,” Bonnie Blanton Vance. Mamaw was a Jesus-loving, gun-toting, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed matriarch from rural Kentucky who fiercely defended her family and provided stability and guidance for her bright young grandson. Mamaw is an archetype of the Jacksonian evangelical, who exhibits great faith, familial loyalties, and patriotism, combined with low-church attendance and minimal or no community involvement. Jacksonians continue to provide Trump’s core base among religious conservatives, and their support for Trump is unwavering. In 2012, this group, historically the base of the Democratic party, found they were unwelcome in the “Obama coalition.” They were dismissed by Barack Obama as denizens of cultural backwaters who “cling” to their guns, religion, and xenophobia. As Walter Russell Mead observed,
Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate.
Given the threat of cultural liquidation, Jacksonian support for Trump was not a mere policy preference. It was existential. In 2012, the GOP was culturally friendly to Jacksonians but did not constitute a genuine political alternative. Republicans were the champions of free-market globalization who had voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and outsourced the auto and steel industries, devastating Jacksonian communities. When Wall Street maven and Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won the 2012 Republican nomination, it signaled the GOP’s indifference to Jacksonian America. Alienated, discarded, and politically homeless, the Jacksonians stayed home. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics documented the departure of Jacksonians from the 2012 electorate. It would take a political entrepreneur to bring them back.
In 2016, Trump led a political effort to bring the Jacksonians permanently into the Republican orbit. The Republican establishment viewed his campaign as a hostile takeover, and a civil war in the GOP ensued. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Jacksonians provided roughly 36 percent of Trump’s solid support and in many ways underwrote his initial success. Trump’s decisive victory in 2024 signals that Jacksonian Americans have reemerged as a pivotal force in American politics. Indeed, what started in 2016 as a white working-class uprising may have broadened into a multi-ethnic working-class movement.
In 2016, Trump’s success in drawing 81 percent of the evangelical vote in the general election depended not only on Jacksonians but on his courtship of Tocquevillian evangelicals, estimated to make up 60 to 70 percent of the evangelical community. Tocquevillians have higher rates of religiosity, church attendance, and social capital than the Jacksonians. Given their higher attachment to community and institutional life, they have been more sensitive than the Jacksonians to Trump’s coarseness and foibles, and to negative pressure from the dominant culture. For these reasons and others, Tocquevillian support for Trump has been more qualified and transactional than that of the Jacksonians.
For example, Tocquevillians are ardently pro-life, and they voted for Trump in 2016 because he promised to appoint constitutionally sound judges. Trump delivered on this promise, and Roe v. Wade was overturned. This outcome vindicated the Tocquevillians’ transaction.
Trump’s recent tack to the libertarian center on abortion has caused alarm in this cohort. Yet in the 2024 election, Trump still earned the votes of 92 percent of the voters who support laws against abortion. As of now, his softening on abortion has not tempered Tocquevillian support. Perhaps the actions of his administration will. Already, Trump’s former vice president has articulated Tocquevillian horror at Trump’s nomination of the pro-choice Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Whether Mike Pence is a leading indicator of Tocquevillian disillusionment or merely an anomaly as a dropout from the Trump coalition remains to be seen.
Elite evangelicals, prompted by the strength of evangelical support for Trump, have since 2016 formed a small but strident “NeverTrump” resistance. These elites often lead evangelical institutions, serve in the evangelical academy, and pastor brand-centered culturally adaptive megachurches. In addition to questioning Trump’s devoutness, evangelical elites viscerally reject the entire Trump aesthetic, which is at odds with the more refined mode of the cultural heights. This aesthetic distaste may motivate their criticism, as much as their substantive rejection of Trump’s politics.
In 2024, some left-leaning elites sought to diminish evangelical influence on the election. One such effort took the form of a foundation-funded Bible study curriculum that counseled the detachment of “true” Christians from the partisan political realm. With 82 percent support for Trump, rank-and-file evangelicals did not respond to these directives as expected, and the effort failed. One wonders whether such initiatives will continue to be seen as a good investment of leftist time and money.
The cultural distinctives of these three evangelical cohorts will be important to understanding evangelical support for Trump going forward. It is likely that Jacksonians will rise or fall with the Trump movement, transactional Tocquevillians will support Trump as long as their cultural checks clear, and elites will remain “NeverTrump” as long as the dominant leftwing culture remains opposed to Trump and the MAGA movement.
The overall evangelical share of the electorate declined from 28 to 22 percent between 2020 and 2024. This decline might have been caused by increasing polarization, as fewer people claim the evangelical label, or by the declining religiosity of the dominant culture, or (most likely) by both. Regardless, white evangelicals still represent a substantial voting constituency.
Overall, voters claiming a Christian religious affiliation made up 64 percent of the electorate (down from 68 percent in 2020). Notably, the Catholic vote shifted by a dramatic 10 points, swinging from 52 percent support for Biden in 2020 to 58 percent support for Trump in 2024. With 82 percent of white evangelicals, 63 percent of Protestants, and 58 percent of Catholics voting for Trump, this broadly religious vote represents the most important demographic standing consistently for the defense of the traditional family, pro-life policies, and basic common sense on LGBTQ and transgender issues.
The 2024 election also witnessed the rise of what might be called the MAGA Latino vote. Though direct empirical data are scarce, there are indications of a major shift among Latinos. In Texas, where the GOP has lost the presidential vote among Latinos for decades, Trump won 55 percent of the Latino vote, and won fourteen of eighteen counties along the Mexican border. In Starr County, where 97 percent of residents are Latino and the county had voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since 1896, Trump won a startling 57 percent of the vote. One advocate for conservative values among Hispanic Americans describes the vote in the Rio Grande Valley as a “psychological revolution.” Latino Catholics and evangelicals are a growing segment of the electorate and seem to be fed up with the nihilism and economic incompetence of the left. Whether this trend is transient or represents a stable realignment remains to be seen.
What can we expect in the next four years? Will Trump achieve substantial policy victories and use them to consolidate his multi-ethnic working-class and middle-class coalition, which includes Jacksonian and Tocquevillian evangelicals? Or will his tack to the libertarian center on abortion and LGBT issues cost him religious conservative votes in the future? In an increasingly secular culture, the shift to self-protection by religious conservatives is likely to endure. In the end, the 2024 election can be seen as a vindication of the Jacksonian and Tocquevillian evangelicals who supported Donald J. Trump. An essential question going forward is whether Trump will be able to hold the increasingly diverse religious wing of his political coalition together.
Darren Patrick Guerra is professor of political science at Biola University.
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Image by Matt Johnson, provided by Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
