The 2024 presidential election may have been Donald Trump’s best yet.
While white evangelicals’ strong support for the former president didn’t budge, he made sizable gains among Catholic and Hispanic voters that helped him sweep battleground states.
Projections show Trump may be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote, beating out Democrat Kamala Harris.
Vice President Harris improved upon President Joe Biden’s numbers with white Americans, though a 55-percent majority continued to back Trump. The Republican candidate also improved among non-white voters; in 2016, Trump got 21 percent of the non-white vote, compared to Biden’s 74 percent. This year, the gap narrowed: 32 percent to Harris’s 65 percent, political scientist Daniel Bennett noted.
Trump’s win comes in part thanks to improved performance among Catholic voters, who make up about a quarter of the electorate and went for Trump by a 15-point margin. A Catholic himself, Biden won his fellow faithfuls in the 2020 contest, but 58 percent of Catholics voted for Trump over Harris this time, according to The Washington Post’s exit polls.
“Exit polls aren’t perfect, but they show that large majorities of the country are deeply concerned about the economy and inflation, and those voters went heavily for Trump,” said Caleb Verbois, political science professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, a key swing state with a sizable Catholic population that went for Trump this year.
The Trump campaign chose Ohio senator and Catholic convert JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Vance will be the second Catholic VP behind Biden. In an op-ed last month, Vance suggested that a Harris administration would be biased against Catholics after Harris said she would not support faith-based exemptions for health providers on abortion legislation.
While Verbois said much of the evangelical landscape appeared unchanged, one of his takeaways is that abortion may be less motivating than in previous years.
“For pro-life Christian voters, abortion is just not as salient of an issue as it used to be,” Verbois said. “Trump has made it very clear that he does not really care about abortion and has moderated on it, and that didn’t keep pro-life voters away.
“There has never been a time in the last 50 years when there were fewer legal barriers to pro-life legislation, and yet politically the pro-life movement is on life support. Seven states just voted to enshrine abortion rights into their laws, and Florida only failed to do so because the measure needed a super-majority to pass.”
A survey from Lifeway Research found in September that voters with evangelical beliefs ranked abortion as their fifth issue, behind the economy, immigration, national security, and personal character.
Exit polls from The Washington Post found that even voters who believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases voted for Trump by nearly 30 percent.
Meanwhile, Democrats bet that their voters would turn out due to concerns over abortion access.
“Harris’s team seemed to assume that abortion and democracy concerns were all that mattered. But groceries cost 25 percent more now than they did in the fall of 2020. That mattered to voters,” Verbois said.
A survey by the Associated Press found that the economy and jobs were the top issues for voters at 39 percent, followed by immigration. Abortion came in next at only 11 percent.
“The fundamentals matter a whole lot,” Ryan Burge, a religion researcher and political science professor, told Christianity Today, referencing James Carville’s campaign line: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Voters motivated by the economy led to a strong showing for Republicans in rural areas and generally among men, voters without college degrees, and young voters, as well as in some minority demographics. Harris was unable to make up that support in urban areas, despite having more support from Black voters and women.
Trump captured the majority of men under 30, a group Biden won last time. The campaign expended substantial energy seeking to appeal to younger male voters and earned endorsements from podcasting giant Joe Rogan and tech billionaire Elon Musk, both of whom got shoutouts during Trump’s election night celebration.
With Trump on the ticket, Republicans have seen major improvement among Hispanic voters, the majority of whom are Catholic or evangelical.
In 2016, Trump won 17 percent of Hispanics. By 2020, 32 percent. With Hispanic voters this year, he narrowed the gap. Trump won 45 percent while Harris won 53 percent. Trump was also able to win among Hispanic men for the first time.
“These numbers show a growing trend—the Latino vote is conservative in essence and vote for what is best for the country they live in and love,” said Javier Chavez, pastor of Amistad Cristiana Church in Gainesville, Georgia.
“And just like that, Latino voters become the belles of the ball, becoming an electoral asset for the GOP, and a liability for Democrats in many states across the country,” said Daniel Garza, president of the Libre Initiative. Activists at Libre have worked for months to encourage more Hispanic voters to get engaged politically and vote Republican.
White evangelicals remained the strongest religious group for Republicans, voting for Trump by almost two to one.
White evangelicals’ margin of support for Trump stayed at 81 percent, exit polls found. That percentage hasn’t budged the last two cycles, and they have been stalwarts of the Republican base for years. “That’s the norm at this point, going all the way back to 2004,” Burge said. “This is exactly what you would expect. Nothing’s changed.”
Still, there have been shifts in who chooses to identify as evangelical. After 2020, more Trump supporters began calling themselves evangelicals, even if they hadn’t previously used the label and weren’t going to church.
White evangelicals supported George W. Bush in 2004 by 79 percent, John McCain in 2008 by 73 percent, and Mitt Romney in 2012 by 79 percent.
They voted for Trump by 81 percent in 2016 and 76 percent in 2020 (other 2020 estimates placed the number closer to 81 percent).
In a concession speech Wednesday, Harris said her team would work with Trump’s to peacefully transition to the next administration.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. “At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.”
Harris encouraged Americans disappointed by the outcome to continue to engage politically.
“Here’s the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win,” she said. “The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place.”
