Understanding White Evangelicals

By Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)

Yesterday, journalist Ryan Grim tweeted a thread on white evangelicals. Long-time DFP readers will know this is a question of importance to me, and I recently made the argument that white evangelicals have a strong claim to being Trump’s “base.” Grim makes the case that we should break out college/non-college voters by evangelical status and performs a calculation on the generic ballot. Looking back at 2016, this exercise is instructive. Trump overwhelmingly wins the two-party vote among college and non-college evangelicals. Among non-evangelical whites, however, he only narrowly wins non-college and gets crushed among college.

 
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This is 2016 data, so we’ll update very soon with 2018 data, but this dynamic is very key to watch. If Democrats improve their margins with non-evangelical whites, both non-college and college, they’ll make huge improvements towards improving their margins in the House. My bet would be that evangelicals mostly stick with Trump and Democrats improve with non-evangelical whites, with and without college degrees.

Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) is a co-founder of Data for Progress.

Sean McElwee