Opinion Vote for Trump Again or Swtich

a photo collage of anti- and pro-Trump voters, with an elephant in the middle Tanganyika Zinzani for NPR hibernate caption

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Tanganyika Zinzani for NPR

a photograph collage of anti- and pro-Trump voters, with an elephant in the middle

Tanganyika Zinzani for NPR

1 of the biggest storylines from the 2020 presidential race has ... well, race at the center of it. If you paid attention to the stories almost exit polling, you heard a lot of talk about how Latinx and Black voters showed up in bigger numbers this yr than dorsum in 2016. But on this week's episode, we also focus on a conversation that's not happening: The one about a group whose back up for Donald Trump hasn't wavered. Nosotros're talking almost the white vote, and in item, white evangelical voters.

Trump'due south support is overwhelmingly white, but no ane goes harder for him than the white voters who have been the beating heart of the conservative movement for decades. No matter what happened over the last four years — Charlottesville, 'sh*thole countries," the disastrous treatment of the coronavirus pandemic — about 80 pct of white evangelicals consistently approved of President Trump's performance.

While their numbers have dwindled from 21 to xv% of the U.Due south. population, white evangelicals are a force to be reckoned with in politics, says Robert P. Jones, the writer of White As well Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity and the CEO of the Public Organized religion Research Institute. They make upward a little over a third of Republicans, Jones says, and take an outsized impact on elections, making up about a quarter of voters. That'south right—xv% of Americans account for around 25% of those who plough out to vote.

We talked to Jones almost the ability of this voting bloc, and what that means for the national discussion around race in this country. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You lot said that the number of white evangelicals dropped from 21 to 15%. What's happening in that location? Is that just attrition, people growing old and dying, or people no longer identifying as evangelical?

It'southward a mix of those things. It'due south more decline than would be accounted for than but only generational replacement; in that location are lower birth rates, and and so in that location are more than people dying than are beingness born. And so there is that dynamic. But what's really turbocharged the drop in the final decade has been younger people leaving the grouping. So i of the other things nosotros're seeing is that, as [the group] is shrinking, it'southward also becoming older. The median age has been ticking up; the median historic period now is in the high 50s in this group, and only around one in ten are under the age of 30.

How different are white evangelicals from white voters in general? Do they have regional bases? How educated are they compared with white voters more than broadly?

They are older, and they tend to exist concentrated more in the S and the Midwest. And so they're more populous in those states.

Simply notably, if you lot talked to [a white evangelical person] a generation or ii ago, they would accept been less likely to have a college education than Americans as a whole. But at that place's really been a decent corporeality of upwardly mobility in this grouping.

And in fact, information technology's really tied to the lower birth rates; ane of the things that has led to lower birth rates is more evangelical women getting college degrees, wanting a career and spacing out having kids. And so we're actually [finding] now that they're roughly comparable to the state as a whole in terms of the number of who accept four year higher degrees.

In some of the recent polling information that you found before the election, eight in 10 white evangelicals said that they would vote for Trump. Given Trump's very detail biography and demeanor, his appeal amid white evangelicals is confusing for a lot of u.s.a. who are not function of that world. So why take they embraced him so enthusiastically?

I recall I've probably spent more fourth dimension answering this question over the last 4 years than perhaps whatever other question in my career. It is perplexing. And the reason it is perplexing is that this group has defined itself equally and then-called values voters, right. That's the internal history there. Only there are ii things hither.They accept supported Republican candidates, no matter who they were, going all the way back to Reagan. So [their support for Trump] is not atypical. Now, it was notable that [white evangelical back up of Trump] reached 81 per centum in the go out polls in 2016, which was even higher than what George Westward. Bush got. And he was kind of one of their own, who himself identified as evangelical.

Trump's appeal among this group really was a cultural entreatment. It was really the "Make America Bully Over again" mantra. I retrieve most of the power of that slogan was in the last word: once again. It was hearkening back to a kind of 1950s America, where white Christians and specially white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were more than dominant in the society demographically and culturally. That's also plain before Brownish 5. Board of Education, desegregation and the civil rights motion. And it really had that power. I even started calling them nostalgia voters in the 2016 election cycle, considering it was that astern pull that was really the real attraction.

In 2016, the question [about evangelicals] was: How could you vote for someone who'due south been divorced and remarried multiple times, who talked near sort of sexually assaulting women, who paid off a porn star? I think the more than relevant question for 2020 is: How could white evangelicals continue to support a candidate who has openly refused to call out white supremacist groups, who has said derogatory things around immigrants? Now, we've had four years of this: the deprival of systemic racism, criticizing protesters and what can only be called really racist rhetoric. And I retrieve the reply to that is that it's really part of the worldview that white evangelicals still hold. And so those kinds of appeals actually weren't repellant; they were actually part of the allure of Trump to white evangelicals.

You institute that white evangelicals are the simply religious group to think that Islam is at odds with American values. And while most Americans say that police are discriminatory towards Black folks, white evangelicals overwhelmingly do not think that's the example. But in that location is a minority of white evangelicals who don't experience that way, according to your survey data. What practise we know about those white evangelicals? And why are they breaking with the wider evangelical globe on bug effectually race?

It's interesting. There are just modest age differences hither, and the differences there do tend to be more along educational lines. Those with a four-year college degree tend to be more than able, I think, to run into these patterns of systemic racism. And in our survey, what nosotros asked was: Do you recollect that the recent killing of African-Americans by police is part of a pattern of how police care for African-Americans? Or do you retrieve they were isolated incidents?

And what we discover is, overall, seven in ten white evangelicals say that these are merely isolated incidents. They're the merely religious grouping with that level of kind of denial of systemic racism in policing. They're also the only religious grouping that has non moved over the last v years. That's worth saying also: Other white Christian groups, similar white Catholics and mainline Protestants for example, have moved 10 percent points on this question. They're much more than probable to see this as part of a design and something that needs to exist addressed, whereas white evangelicals remain every bit dug-in and actually unmoved past five years of protest, by v years of more police force shootings and constabulary killings.

The other thing to say is it'due south [somewhat about] educational activity, but the biggest driver is partisanship. The 20% of evangelicals that place as Democrats are by far the ones who are more than probable to encounter this systemic racism.

Given this generational attrition, what does that mean for the power of white evangelicals going forward?

We'll need a long horizon to encounter it. But there'southward no uncertainty that the group is shrinking and crumbling, and that but means 1 affair for the future. There's only so long it tin can really continue to hold upwardly that kind of influence, but because the numbers simply won't be there in that way.

If yous await at the two political parties today, a third of the Republican Party is white evangelical. But if you lot add in the other white Christian groups, it's about ii thirds white and Christian. If yous add in white Catholics and white mainline Protestants, the Democratic Party is simply virtually ane third white and Christian. And if you map those on to the generational cohorts, it means that the Republican Party, in terms of its racial and religious composition, looks something like 70-year-onetime America. And the Autonomous Party in terms of the racial and religious composition, looks about similar thirty-year-old America.

And and so, you know, if you're thinking from a partisan lens or from a religious lens, this is non a long term recipe for power, actually. I think sooner or later, there will have to be more than of a political reckoning to rethink this trajectory in the Republican Party. Unfortunately, I recollect information technology'due south going to take decisive losses at the national level that are probably of a magnitude bigger than the ones we've just seen, for that message to really sink in.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/935910276/the-white-elephants-in-the-room

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