Non-white Evangelicals swung hard to President Donald Trump in the last presidential election, reflecting existing data showing Latino voters of faith have shifted their support toward Republicans, according to a new report.
In an article posted to his Graphs About Religion Substack on Monday, researcher Ryan Burge examined voting patterns among Evangelical Christians of all races in the five most recent presidential elections based on data from the Cooperative Election Study.
Burge’s analysis comes less than six months after President Donald Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
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Elections included in the analysis are the 2008, 2012 and 2020 presidential elections, which Republicans lost, as well as the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections that Republicans won. Trump was the Republican presidential nominee in the latter three presidential elections.
The data shared by Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, found that Trump received the highest level of support of any Republican presidential nominee since 2008 among Evangelicals of all races.
As a whole, Evangelicals have voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since 2008.
Evangelical support for the Republican presidential nominee was at its lowest point in the 2012 presidential election when Republican Mitt Romney captured 69% of the Evangelical vote. Trump received 75% of the Evangelical vote in 2024, an improvement from the share he captured in his previous presidential bids in 2020 (73%) and 2016 (70%).
Trump’s support among white Evangelicals reached a high of 83% in 2024, an increase from the 81% vote share he received from the group in 2020 and the 78% of the vote he captured in 2016.
Trump’s increased support in 2024 was even more pronounced among non-white Evangelicals.
In every presidential election between 2008 and 2020, a majority of non-white Evangelicals supported the Democratic presidential nominee. In Trump’s first two presidential bids, he received only 35% and 40% of the vote from non-white Evangelicals.
In both those elections and the two before, non-white Evangelicals backed the Democratic presidential nominee by double digits. That changed in 2024 when Harris only captured 49% of the vote among this demographic. Trump was close behind, capturing 48% of the vote. This represents a dramatic swing from the 2020 presidential election when President Joe Biden beat Trump by 18 points among non-white Evangelicals. Burge called Trump’s gains among non-white Evangelicals “a huge blow.”
“There’s a lot going on in this graph but I think that the big narrative is how Trump just continues to make gains among evangelical voters,” Burge wrote. “Between 2016 and 2024 he gained five points among yearly attending evangelicals, eight points among monthly attending evangelicals, seven points among weekly attendees and eight points among those who attended multiple times per week. However, Trump didn’t actually lose ground with those who attend less than once a year.”
Burge found that 90% of white Evangelicals who attended church multiple times per week supported Trump in 2024, a nine-point gain from 2016.
“The white evangelical results just basically mirror the analysis from the entire evangelical sample,” he wrote. “He made gains at every attendance level from yearly on up. The only question I have when looking at this graph is: how high can he go with this group? Ninety percent is essentially unanimous in the world of public polling.”
Burge’s post builds on existing data documented in exit polls published following the 2024 presidential election, which found that Latinos swung harder to Trump than the 2020 election.
Exit polling of 22,914 voters conducted as they left their polling places found that Harris beat Trump by 5 points among Latinos. Four years earlier, Biden beat Trump by 33 points among this demographic.
Broken down by religious affiliation, the exit polling found that 64% of Latino Protestants supported Trump in the 2024 election. According to this data, Trump also won a majority of the vote among Latino Catholics (53%).
A poll of 5,772 adults and a subsample of 4,757 adults who voted in the 2024 presidential election conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute between Nov. 8 and Dec. 2, 2024, yielded slightly different results. Like the exit polling, the survey measured Trump’s support among Latino Protestants at 64%. The PRRI poll found that 55% of Hispanic Catholics backed Harris.
In an op-ed published in The Christian Post shortly before the 2024 presidential election, the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference elaborated on why he thought Latinos, particularly Latinos of faith, would swing to Republicans in the election.
He cited the Democrats’ position in favor of laws allowing late-term abortion and hostility toward parental rights as factors that would alienate Latino voters who place a high emphasis on faith and family.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
