Tag: evangelical voters
How Joe Biden Won The Iowa Republican Caucus

How Joe Biden Won The Iowa Republican Caucus

Donald Trump’s win in the Iowa caucus on Monday night was described as a “landslide” (CNN); “sweeping” (New York Times); “dominant” (BBC), “dominates” (ABC News); “runaway” (Time); “commanding” (AP); “resounding” (Reuters); and so on.

You would think that Trump walked out of Iowa with a huge majority of delegates to the Republican National Convention, which is what the caucuses actually produce. Take a guess at how many delegates Donald Trump won last night? With 51 percent of the vote, he won twenty. Take a guess how many delegates are not pledged to Donald Trump after last night’s vote? With 49 percent of the vote going to other candidates on the Iowa ballot, that number is also twenty -- DeSantis won nine, Haley won eight, and Ramaswamy won three.

According to figures from the New York Times, a total of 110,298 Iowa Republicans turned out to vote in sub-zero temperatures, with 56,260 votes going to Trump and 54,038 going to other candidates. Another way of saying that is, 49 percent of the vote went to not-Trump.

Where it gets interesting is who those non-Trump voters are. In a poll of likely caucus-goers conducted by the Des Moines Register in conjunction with NBC News just before the vote, 48 percent gave Donald Trump as their first choice at the caucus they planned to attend. That number tracks fairly closely to Trump’s final vote total of 51 percent. Eleven percent of those likely caucus voters told pollsters that if Donald Trump ends up being the Republican Party nominee, they will vote for Joe Biden. Using last night’s vote totals, that is 12,132. In the same poll of likely caucus-goers, 20 percent said they planned to vote for Nikki Haley. Stunningly, among Haley’s 20 percent of the caucus voters, 43 percent said that if Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee in November, they will vote for Joe Biden. That is an incredible number when you consider that these are Republican voters.

It's important to remember that these numbers are unlikely to include typical Biden voters, who tend to be less white, more urban, and younger in age. In the state of Iowa, folks, when you talk about Republican voters, you are talking about some of the most rural, evangelical, Caucasian, and older voters in the whole country. According to figures from the Wall Street Journal, 35 percent of Iowa caucus voters last night were between 45 and 64 years old, and 31 percent were over 65. Ninety-seven percent were white, one percent were Hispanic, and zero percent were Black or Asian. Sixty-three percent of Iowa caucus-goers had not graduated from college. Seventy-two percent described themselves as either somewhat or very conservative. Forty-six percent described themselves as “white evangelical/white born-again Christians.” Sixty-one percent said they had at least one gun in their household.

According to exit polls by NBC News, 61 percent of those voting in the Republican caucus last night in Iowa said they would favor a national ban on abortions. According to NBC, “Trump won a majority (55 percent) of voters who favor an abortion ban.”

Let’s see…according to the latest poll by the Pew Research Center, fully 61 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. According to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, “73 percent of all U.S. adults, including 58 percent of those in states with the strictest bans, believe abortion should be allowed at six weeks of pregnancy.” The PBS News Hour interpreted those numbers to mean that “Few U.S. adults support full abortion bans, even in states that have them.”

As Donald Trump famously bragged to a Fox News town hall in New Hampshire last week, “For fifty-four years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.” Well, that worked for him in Iowa among old conservative Christians. He got 55 percent of voters in that state who favor a total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. He’s got the felon vote, too. According to the Edison Research poll of voters in the Iowa caucus last night, 65 percent said Trump would still be fit to be president if he is convicted of a crime. Only 31 percent said he would be unfit.

So where do the results of the Iowa caucus leave us? Donald Trump won 51 percent of the vote of people who are old, white, rural, and evangelical Christians. But among the same people, he lost 49 percent of the vote to people like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. According to Pew, about 24 percent of American adults describe themselves as evangelical Christians, so he’s got at least 12 percent of American adults who are conservative Christians.

The New York Times headlined its story on the Iowa results by calling “Trump’s ties to his voters…the most durable force in American politics.” The operative word in that analysis is “his voters.” There were just over 110,000 Republicans who turned out for the Iowa caucus. Nearly half of them weren’t his. What does that tell you about Trump’s “ties” to his voters? It tells me that the man who supposedly controls the entire Republican Party may have a stranglehold on Republicans in the House of Representatives, he may control the estimated 25 percent of Republicans who describe themselves as MAGA, but when it gets down to voters in one of the states every political pundit sees as favorable to him, Donald Trump could not convince nearly 50 percent of them to vote for him.

I’m telling you: they must have been jumping up and down in the halls of the White House last night when the Iowa results came in.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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Evangelical Leaders Still Support Trump — But Will Lewd Remarks Repel Voters?

Evangelical Leaders Still Support Trump — But Will Lewd Remarks Repel Voters?

By Steve Holland and Michelle Conlin

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Leaders of religious conservative groups largely stood behind Donald Trump on Saturday, the day after vulgar sexual comments he made about women surfaced online, but some expressed concern that the U.S. Republican presidential nominee’s remarks could depress evangelical turnout on Election Day.

Most evangelical leaders did not condemn Trump, and instead pointed to an urgent need to prevent Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency, reshaping the Supreme Court and implementing liberal policies.

The latest blow to Trump’s campaign came after a 2005 video surfaced of the then-reality TV star talking on an open microphone about groping women and trying to seduce a married woman. Vice presidential running mate Mike Pence said he could not defend Trump’s words.

Gary Bauer, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, said Trump’s “grossly inappropriate language” does not change the choice facing the country in the Nov. 8 election and that “I continue to support the Trump-Pence ticket.”

“Hillary Clinton is committed to enacting policies that will erode religious liberty, promote abortion, make our country less safe, and leave our borders unprotected,” Bauer said.

White evangelicals make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, and represent a crucial voting bloc Trump needs to win the presidency.

They have long represented a pillar of support for Republicans. In 2004, they were instrumental in President George W. Bush’s re-election. They turned out in similar numbers in 2008 and 2012, when Mitt Romney, a Mormon who many evangelicals considered too moderate, was the Republican nominee, according to a report by the Pew Research Center.

Support from evangelicals for Trump has been strong throughout his campaign, even though it was only late in life that the New York businessman adopted their cause. Social conservatives flocked to his side over other deeply religious Republican presidential candidates, such as Ted Cruz.

“Naturally I’m disappointed,” said Steve Scheffler, head of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. “But, you know, the Bible tells me that we are all sinners saved by grace and I don’t think there’s probably a person alive that I know of that hasn’t made some mistakes in the past.”

He said Clinton has peccadilloes of her own, most notably marital woes with her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

“So yes, I will vote for Donald Trump. I’m not excusing his behavior at all. It’s disgusting,” he said.

Still, politically active Christian conservative leaders across the country said they were worried that Trump’s comments could depress turnout among evangelicals.

“Evangelicals are not going to vote for Hillary,” said religious political activist David Lane. “But this could cause them to stay home. This could be a big deal. Things like this matter.”

Much will hinge on Trump’s performance in the second presidential debate on Sunday night, and whether he can convince Christians that he is a changed man, Lane said.

“He already apologized and said he was wrong,” said Lane. “I think he’s moving in the right direction. But he’s got to do really well in the debate Sunday night.”

Other religious leaders, however, were less forgiving.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, tweeted an article detailing evangelical apathy toward the Trump tape, calling it a “disgrace.”

“What a scandal to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the integrity of our witness,” Moore wrote.

Still, the majority view among religious conservatives appeared to be summed up by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council action group, who said evangelicals “are left with a choice of voting for the one who will do the least damage to our freedoms.”

“This is far from an ideal situation, but it is the reality in which we find ourselves and as difficult as it is, I refuse to find sanctuary on the sidelines and allow the country and culture to deteriorate even further by continuing the policies of the last eight years,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson and Amy Tennery in New York; Editing by Bill Rigby)

IMAGE: Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council

Why Donald Trump Will Campaign On The Most Conservative Republican Platform In Decades

Why Donald Trump Will Campaign On The Most Conservative Republican Platform In Decades

The Republican platform may be more conservative than any time in decades, but that wasn’t Donald Trump’s choice.

Evangelical Republicans are celebrating a victory as their party’s platform falls far to the right of its usual stances on key social issues — and even further right than Trump’s more moderate views on things like gay rights and abortion.

This odd discord between the candidate and the platform isn’t yet a sign of resurgent movement conservatism in the GOP, but rather owes itself to an unusually distant approach to policy from the nominee. Rather than pushing his own views onto the platform, as in past elections, Trump’s campaign instead looked to rally the Christian base so he could secure the nomination despite murmurs of mutiny.

Without a strong presence from Trump, social conservative Tony Perkins — who leads the anti-gay, pro-life Family Research Council — was able “to show his hands in dozens of amendments,” the New York Times’ Jeremy Peters reported. Notably, Trump has had a rocky relationship with Perkins and other evangelical political influencers, hundreds of whom met with him at a daylong conference in May to “seek mutual understanding.”

On gay rights, for instance, Perkins and other evangelicals squashed any liberal impulses in the platform, which now supports gay conversion therapy and opposes marriage equality. The president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative gay group, called it the “most anti-LGBT platform” in the party’s history.

Even a proposed amendment that sought to recognize gays as targets of ISIS was shot down with the rationale that it would be playing into identity politics and inappropriately singling out a specific group, according to Peters’ Times story.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Peters explained that — along with his choice of judges and running-mate — the platform was one of a few ways Trump could rally the evangelical base and affirm his (sometimes questionable) credentials as a conservative.

“This is the most socially conservative platform the Republican Party has ever adopted, and that’s in no small part because Donald Trump and his campaign did not take much of an interest in the social aspects of this,” he said. “Now you have a platform that is basically — I mean, I described it to one person the other day, as Tony Perkins’ platform.”

Notably, the GOP’s platform also supported restrictions that would force trans people to use the bathrooms for gender they were assigned at birth instead of their identified gender, in step with North Carolina’s HB2 legislation. Trump has vocally expressed the opposite view, saying that he would allow Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to use the women’s bathroom at Trump Tower — as indeed she has. 

And the platform condemns all types of abortion, though Trump has stated his support for the choice in cases of rape, incest, or health complications, NBC News reported.

A proposed amendment on medical marijuana — another policy that Trump said he supports — was shut down by socially conservative delegates, one of whom even suggested that “all of the mass killings that have taken place… they’re all smoking pot,” according to a CNN report.

In short, the conservatives’ victory in the platform committee is perhaps less significant than it may seem: The platform only ended up so far to the right because Trump needed to draw support from evangelical leaders. As with Democrats, Republican elected officials are not bound by the language in the platform. But it does set the tone for the months ahead.

Currently, when it comes to the polls themselves, Trump doesn’t need to go any further right.

Unlike their political leaders, most evangelical voters — a whopping 78 percent, according to a recent Pew study — have already committed to voting for Trump, despite his more centrist views on abortion and gay rights. (A Christian news site reporting on the same study has nonetheless declared that evangelical voters “will vote Trump, but not for Trump“.)

The unusually conservative Republican platform, then, seems like it’s more a ploy to get leadership including Perkins and likeminded delegates (like Mary Frances Forrester, who successfully pushed for an amendment calling porn a “public health crisis”) onboard — at least through the end of the weekend.

Photo: Tony Perkins via Gage Skidmore / Flickr

Should Evangelical Voters Trust Trump? Cruz? Rubio? Not So Much

Should Evangelical Voters Trust Trump? Cruz? Rubio? Not So Much

On Monday evening, as many as 150,000 dedicated Republicans in Iowa are going to show up at schools, libraries, community centers, and firehouses to write the names of GOP Presidential candidates on slips of paper. Of those caucus participants, polling suggests that over 60 percent will describe themselves as evangelical Christians.

Current polling also suggests that the top three choices, and therefore delegate winners, will be Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.

Would the interests of Iowa’s evangelical Christian voters be served by any of those candidates?  If history has any predictive power, not too well. Certainly,those three don’t live the religious life that evangelical voters seem to believe is the most important thing in choosing a leader. (Remember, what counts is acts, not words.)

So how do the candidates act, in evangelical terms?

Trump, as we know, only sees the inside of a church when he thinks showing up there might help him.  He says he never does anything wrong, so he’s never had to ask forgiveness from God.  And his attempts to refer to the Bible are laughable.  But maybe his charitable acts tell another story?  Nope.  He has donated less to charity than almost anyone in his income range.  His namesake charity, the Donald J.Trump Foundation, is remarkably stingy and smells like a scam.  Last year his foundation gave out just over $500,000, and of that, $100,000 went to the purely political “charity” called Citizens United. The year before, $100,000 of Trump’s charitable donations went to Jerry Falwell, Jr’s political operation.  And there was also a nice donation to the slush fund that Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife runs as an “advocacy group.” It was “charity” as political favor-buying, in other words.

The Trump Foundation itself seems to have no particular significance for Trump when it comes to giving money.  He’s put in virtually none of his own money for nearly ten years, and the money that has come in seems to come from business suppliers and other interested parties. just before they ink deals with his management company.  I guess Stark Carpets just feels especially charitable when a new contract for hotel carpets is about to be signed. That has happened five times over the years, so far.

But at least Trump doesn’t claim his religion drives every waking moment of his life and every decision he makes.

Senator Cruz (R-TX), on the other hand, is pushing his affinity for the evangelical community big time.  Too bad he had to release his tax returns. Despite earning a family income well over $1 million per year, the five-year period from 2006 through 2010 was a time when the Cruz family felt no need to donate even one thin dime to any church. What happened after 2010? Oh yes, he started running for public office.

Then we have Senator Rubio  (R-FL), a slick speaker who looks like a shoo-in for student body president. Rubio seems to adopt a new set of religious beliefs every time he moves to a new place.  It’s hard to keep up, but he’s on his third faith so far. Is it too cynical to imagine something other than spiritual awakening made him adopt Mormonism, converting from Catholicism, when he lived in Nevada?  Evidently another spiritual awakening struck him like a thunderbolt when he moved to Florida, and incidentally wanted to join the leadership of the Republican-led state legislature there. Mormonism got jettisoned, and on came his rebirth as an evangelical Protestant.

If any of these three gentlemen becomes the GOP candidate for President, it’s the evangelical community that play the role of unions on the Democratic side, by organizing and providing the foot soldiers who knock on doors and operate the telephone banks.  Will the evangelicals who do that essential work get their payoff in policy priorities from these guys?

The religious right has been burned so many times before by candidates who say they care, and then drop them like a hot potato after the election. Is there any reason to think this time will be different?