Donald Trump’s gains with nonwhite evangelical voters is one of several explanations Ryan Burge offers for what happened in the 2024 presidential election.
The story of white evangelical support for Trump has been documented time and again, but what made a difference in 2024 is growing support among nonwhite evangelicals, says Burge, a professor at Eastern Illinois University and one of the foremost interpreters of religious trends in America today.
The base layer of Trump’s 2024 victory against Kamala Harris was formed by additional growth in support from white evangelicals — even as he was convicted on 34 felony counts, was cited as the instigator of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and spent four years falsely claiming that election was “rigged” against him.
Ryan Burge
Burge notes: “90% of white evangelicals who attended church multiple times per week supported Trump in 2024. That was a nine point gain from 2016.” And among all white evangelicals regardless of church attendance frequency, Trump carried 84% in 2024.
Statistically speaking, Trump has maxed out his support among white evangelicals.
But he had plenty of room to grow in support among nonwhite evangelicals, and that’s the untold story of the election analysis, Burge says in his latest “Graphs About Religion” Substack titled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Church Attendance and Voting for Trump.”
“The breakdown of the non-white evangelical vote may tell the story of the 2024 election when it comes to religion,” he writes. “Republicans have historically struggled with this group of voters. In 2008, Obama enjoyed an 18-point advantage and that expanded dramatically in the next couple of election cycles. In 2012, the non-white evangelical vote was D+30 and it was D+25 in 2016. But then in 2020, Trump managed to make some inroads — getting back to 40% and narrowing the gap to 18 points. But look at 2024 — a huge shift. The non-white evangelical vote was essentially split in 2024 — Harris 49% and Trump at 48%. Harris lost at least ten points with this constituency — a huge blow.”
Burge’s longer post, which is available for free for three months before becoming available only to subscribers, offers many other graphs and several other key points of interpretation:
- Evangelicals of all ethnicities saw Harris as more ideologically liberal than Biden. “It’s also notable that evangelicals saw Biden as slightly more conservative than the Democratic Party as a whole while Harris was slightly more liberal than the Democratic Party.”
- Older evangelicals are more pro-Trump than younger ones.
- Trump did not do well with liberal evangelicals, which is a small group.
Burge’s interpretation comes from the newly released Cooperative Election Study, which shows 22% of all American adults align with an evangelical denomination — 17% of Americans are white evangelicals and 5% are nonwhite evangelicals.
