If you look at the way that everyone except for white Evangelical Christians voted in the 2024 Presidential election, you get pretty much the election that most college educated voters and Democrats expected in the face of a candidate like Donald Trump - it wouldn't have been even close.
And, white Evangelical Christians make up only 14% of American adults, but are 50% more likely than the average American adult to vote. If they didn't vote so reliably, Trump would also almost surely have lost the election, although the election would still have been reasonably close.
About 18% of all voters were white Evangelical Christians who voted for Trump. They made up more than a third of voters who voted for Trump.
In all, 57% of voters in the 2024 election were white, with just over half of them women; 74% of white men (about 21% of all voters) voted for Trump and 69% of white women (about 20% of all voters) voted for Trump. About 39% of white voters were Evangelical Christians. About 66% of white voters who were not Evangelical Christians voted for Trump (the percentage was higher for non-Evangelical white Christians, especially those who most frequently attend church, and lower for white non-Christians).
UPDATE: I note that this exit poll suggests that 57% of voters were white, 30% of voters were black, 8% of voters were Latino, and 5% were from all other races. The percentage of voters who were black seems very high and this deserves another look. The percentage of the population that is black is about 14%, and there is not a history of gross-overrepresentation of black voters in voter turnout.
Recall that in 2016, Trump eked out an electoral vote win despite not winning the popular vote. In 2020, Trump lost both the electoral vote and the popular vote, but the electoral vote was decided by very thin margins in the decisive swing states. In 2024, of course, Trump won both the electoral vote and the popular vote, but once all the votes are counted (early estimates of the popular vote disproportionately omit a huge share of votes in Democratic strongholds like California and Oregon that could their votes slowly) his popular vote margin will be quite thin.
People are often incapable of accurately articulating the reasons that they do things like vote for a particular candidate, so the large number of Trump voters who ascribed their vote to inflation, even if those candidates were sincerely trying to answer truthfully, shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Almost everyone in the United States experienced inflation with respect to goods like groceries and gasoline at roughly the same rate. On average, hourly wages, a decent metric of ability to pay inflation increased prices among those most squeezed by them, rose faster than inflation over the last four years.
The places where voters support Trump most strongly also coincide rather neatly with the places where the cost of living is lowest, mostly because the cost of housing in rural America, small town America, and smaller rust belt cities is much lower and much more affordable relative to median incomes than in large urban centers. If anything, areas where support for Trump was the strongest experienced less inflation than areas where support for Trump was weakest.
A similar analysis applies to the immigration issue which many Trump supporters identified as important. Immigrants make up a much larger share of the population in "blue" America than they do in "red" America. States like West Virginia and Kentucky, where support for Trump was particularly strong, have proportionately very few immigrants, and the immigrants that they have are more likely to be foreign medical doctors, than competitors for the jobs of middle class men with only high school educations that are among the strongest supporters of Trump.
Immigration driven crime also isn't a reality at all, and certainly isn't a reality in "red" America. Indeed, crime was at its lowest rate since 1967. Rising immigrant driven crime was not part of the lived experience of Trump supporters and concern about this was driven almost entirely by Trump himself and kindred Republican politicians.
One can focus on how 2024 was a little different from 2020, and how that was a little different from 2016. But that misses the big picture and fails to explain what Democrats and college educated people more generally have been baffled by, which is the mystery of how such a deeply flawed candidate could win a national Presidential election, or at least come close.
You can't understand that without understanding how white Evangelical Christians who make up just 14% of the adult population in the United States turned a nineteen percentage point popular vote lead among all other Americans into a popular vote deficit of one or two percentage points once all of the votes are counted, and an clear electoral vote loss, despite, and indeed, to a significant extent, because of Trump's flaws.
The percentage of people in a county who identify as white Christians is an excellent predictor of which Presidential candidate it supported as shown in the chart below.
Counties that were at least 60% white Christian in 2020 were overwhelmingly more likely to support Trump against Biden in that election. Counties that were less than 45% white Christian in 2020 were overwhelmingly more likely to support Biden. The more white Christians a county had, the more likely it was to support Trump. Tuned to distinguish white Evangelical Christians from other Christians, this trend would have been even sharper.
The white Evangelical Christian community in the United States has at its core, roots in the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, mostly in the states that would later join the Confederate States of American and fight and lose the U.S. Civil War.
For the most part, "red" America has fewer immigrants, less religious diversity, and less linguistic diversity than anyplace else in the United States. The members of this community have had a visceral distaste for federal government power since before the Civil War until the present, interrupted only by FDR's New Deal during the Great Depression and by World War II. The members of this community have been anti-science and anti-education since at least the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Their churches were racist as a matter of policy and religious doctrine until the tail end of the Civil Rights movement, a movement that this community vigorously resisted from Reconstruction right up through the anti-DEI and anti-woke movement in the latest election cycle. Questions that probe racist continue to be the best predictors of support for Trump. While that has ceased to be a viable official public doctrine, homophobia and transgender scapegoating have filled some of that void.
Southern whites (who have been predominantly Evangelical Christian since the Second Great Awakening, before which they were the most secular people in the U.S.) were vastly less educated, both formally, and as measured by metrics such as literacy race, numbers of books read, and libraries, than the rest of the country since before the Civil War. Their distrust of public schools and efforts to exit them with publicly funded private schools is at least as old as the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Their lack of education and distrust of it also enhances their trust for Trump who at his best communicates with them with a simple vocabulary and simple sentences that they can understand but avoids coming across as condescending because it comes across as if he a buffoon, rather than his audience.
Trump's increasing word salad and dementia is hard for even these supporters to understand, but their commitments to Trump at this point are deep enough that it hardly matters.
Their beliefs about women's proper role in society fueled in substantial part by New Testament religious doctrine that reflect sensibilities about gender relations from the first couple of centuries CE in the Roman Empire, were an important reason that they resisted allowing women to vote until the rest of the country eventually dragged them kicking and screaming into doing so - anti-feminism is as much a part of their cultural DNA as racism and distrust of the federal government.
Their fervent desire to avoid benefiting black people or treating them as equals has jaded their opinions about social welfare and poverty reduction programs since the earliest days after slavery was ended when programs like that were created. In absolute terms, this opposition is counterproductive, but in relative terms, it prevents their collective share of society's wealth from being nudged down.
In relative terms, as a share of income for example, the Civil Rights movement less white men as a group (and white men without college educations even more so) worse off, regardless changes in their absolute earnings. Before then, women were very marginal in the paid workforce, now they make up a little less than half of it at almost all income levels and earn more than half of college degrees (up from barely more than zero in many professionals like law and medicine and science and engineering). Before then, non-whites predominantly got the dregs of the worst jobs, and while the U.S. still isn't at a point of parity, in relative terms, employment prospects for non-whites have improved. Among white men, those with college educations have reaped a huge share of the economic growth in the last half century, while those with only high school educations have seen their inflation adjusted wages increase only slightly. This is partially on them (particularly in the case of men who willfully decline to seek further education or to take their educations seriously), as explained below, but the previous status quo was so profoundly titled in their favor that it was also more or less inevitable. All of these has contributed to a long simmering sense of resentment which demagogues have done their best to exploit, and which Trump has been particularly successful at exploiting.
The result of all of this history has been the development of an insular counterculture that distrusts the government, distrusts educators, distrusts science, and distrusts the mainstream media. This has helped preserve their culture which Evangelical Christian churches helped to foster and nurture. It has also created what political satirists have called a "strain of fact-resistant humans." Unmoored from most of the reliable sources of factually correct information, often proudly, the Evangelical Christian community is especially vulnerable to accepting even blatantly false political rhetoric as true, or at least, as plausible.
The Reconstruction era, and then, a century later after Andrew Jackson dismantled it, the Civil Rights movement, and all along the way, the feminist movement, made acting on some of their core cultural values illegal. Trump has validated their resentment at being forced by the government to disrespect their racist, anti-feminist, anti-science, and anti-academic cultural values.
He has validated their culture's violence embracing, culture of honor values that they are vigorously punished for honoring from elementary school through adulthood (especially under progressive policies undermining corporal punishment, domestic violence, and physically fighting within groups of men and boys to settle disputes) in the face of support for Canadian style "peace, order, and good government" that a disproportionate share of the other 84% of Americans embrace. Support for gun ownership rights to facilitate the use of and threat of lethal force as a form of self-help in lieu of reliance upon law enforcement to deal with crime, exemplifies these values symbolically. These values are unsupported by the New Testament which was a total for ending cultures of honor in classical Rome, but are quite at home with the Old Testament conquering Hebrew herders who shared similar values, which they have embraced despite the fact that the Roman Catholic church and the early Reformation churches took to heart the doctrine the Jesus established a "New Covenant" that relieved them from Old Testament Jewish religious laws like the prohibition on eating pork and bacon.
This community is also more comfortable with authoritarianism, common to less economically successful and more economically insecure populations around the world and back to ancient times, than the more economically successful and more economically secure "blue" America.
This community's lack of economic success and this economic insecurity doesn't come from nowhere. Its resistance to science and academic knowledge, its distrust of government, its unwillingness to support a social safety net because it might disproportionately help black people, its tolerance of violence, its misogyny, and its racism are all important factors that contribute to its lack of economic success and economic insecurity. The resistance that white Evangelical Christian men show to higher education and the value of education more generally, is an important reason that so many of them have been left behind in the last half century of economic growth. So has their attitudes towards race, the treatment of women, and physical violence that has made it difficult to fit into national corporate cultures of big businesses where most economic growth takes place, and has made it more challenging for them to find romantic partners and sustain those relationships.
These failures build resentment to the point where many members of this tightly bound subculture with deep (for the U.S.) historical and cultural roots, aren't worried about the possibility of gross mismanagement of a federal government that they have a century and a half or more of cultural wiring to view as a threat that is thwarting them and their culture instead of as a venue through which positive change can be secured. Ending democracy at the federal level is only salient to you as a factor in your Presidential election choice if you believe that an effective federal government is a good thing. If, deep down, you'd really prefer that the federal government collapsed, then voting for a grossly incompetent President who nonetheless shares many of your core values that have been suppressed with the weight of government power for a very long time, isn't very troubling to you. If you resent the laws that regulate you, you don't hold being a felon against someone running for President as strongly as you do if you believe that most federal laws are legitimate.
Commentators that characterize the 2024 election as a broad based rejection of elites and of our governmental and economic system are missing a key point. Trump's political clout rests first and foremost on the strength of an intensely supportive, united subculture that makes up just one in seven American adults, together with a decidedly lopsided minority that reflexively votes for Republicans for a lifetime of different reasons, rather than from modest support from a broad base of Americans.
This intense minority of white Evangelical Christians that is at the core of the MAGA base, as well as a substantial number of kindred white conservative Christians who are not Evangelical Christians, have an intense hate for Democrats, and especially, younger, non-white, and female Democrats, all of which Kamala Harris exemplified to an even greater extent than Hillary Clinton, let alone Joe Biden, a man who started his political career in Delaware as a devoutly Christian segregationist Democrat and pivoted later in his career to being a leader within the Democratic party of the "war on drugs." Biden isn't that man any more, but had roots that come with his age that are much more congenital to members of this subculture. He was harder for them to hate.
Kamala Harris, in contrast, exemplifies the movement for culture change, and ethnic change in America that members of this subculture and community have been resisting for a couple of centuries, and losing, over and over and over again. In their mind, a world with the sexual revolution, racial equality, and gender equality are a lesser circle of hell on Earth and a blatant, more or less genocidal attempt to wide out their culture and identity. And, after so many losses and such a long time in the wilderness, they are hungry and eager to unite to finally get a victory, whatever it takes, even if the instrument of their redemption is not himself virtuous or competent in running the government. Trump's gut instincts and their gut instincts and beliefs about what a leader looks like have been congruent enough for them to go all-in to support him.
In this narrative, the appeal of Trump's antics and ugly side to a minority that is so intensely supportive that their electoral impact is greatly amplified, and Trump's ability to survive events like the sexual assault judgment against him and his criminal conviction that would be a death-knell for a politician appealing to any other subculture in America, makes much more sense.
You can't simply look at the liberal social gospel and communist leanings of the Jesus of the New Testament's gospels that Evangelical Christianity purports to be all about if you want to understand the lived values and culture that Evangelical Christianity protects and sustains. Indeed, sacred religious texts are almost never, in any major world religion a very predictive tool for determining how members of the religion that holds these texts to be sacred lives their lives and fits these texts into their overall culture. The culture comes first, and the elements of the religion that the members of that culture practice are basically window dressing and local color to adorn it.
Ultimately, Christianity, including white Evangelical Christianity, is in decline in the United States, much later than Europe, for example, but in decline nonetheless. Members of this subculture are well aware of these powerful secular trend and willing to take desperate measures to hold onto the power that they historically held, knowing that the trend will soon become completely unstoppable. In politics, policy preferences almost always prevail over process concerns.
The culture that white Evangelical Christianity sustains and nurtures may have made sense and been functional for the white people of America's slave states in the early 1800s, but it is intensely dysfunctional now. Its culture is a roadmap for failure in the face of the realities of the large American society, which is a big part of why blue leaning counties in the U.S. have twice the per capita GDP of red leaning counties in the U.S.
Their rise to control of the U.S. government in 2024, through their political unity, high level of political participation, and political ruthlessness in the face of political process norms (a tactic that Trump exemplifies) is, as a result, a major threat to the well-being of the United States.
America's other cultures, meanwhile, have grown complacent as the nation has bent to their will, are internally divided by their big and diverse tent, and are insufficiently ruthless to unify in response to this threat, and that's why they lost against a numerically much smaller core opposition. Now, they are paying the price for that complacency and division.
