If Half of Christian Believers Decline to Vote, the Trump Campaign Faces Big Trouble

A new study on the attitudes of Christian voters toward the upcoming election suggests that Donald Trump will have a difficult time replicating the formula that won him the White House eight years ago and brought him close to another victory in 2020.

In particular, a sharply lower turnout among those who describe themselves as “born-again Christians” and “regular churchgoers” will undermine his chances of carrying the swing states he needs to assemble an electoral college majority in his third race for the White House.

The October poll by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reported that barely half (51%) of those who identify as Christian “people of faith” say that they are likely to vote in the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. This contrasts dramatically with the much higher rates of participation in 2016 and 2020, where Trump drew overwhelming support from religious believers, who comprised a huge proportion of all voters and enabled Trump’s highly competitive races in both his prior campaigns.  Overall, 2020 qualified as the highest election turnout of the Twenty-First Century (66.8% of eligible voters) and exit polls showed “white, born-again or evangelical Christians” comprising 28% of all voters. Their preference for the MAGA Man (with 76% of their votes) made him a viable candidate, even with Biden sweeping 62% of the majority of white voters who saw themselves as less fervently religious.

In 2016, Trump’s upset electoral college victory (he lost the popular tally by nearly 3,000,000 votes) would have been altogether inconceivable without his landslide within the white, born-again Christian community – which gave him an astonishing 80% of their ballots.

In this context, the indication that nearly half of regular church-goers, less than a month before election day, still consider it “unlikely” that they will vote at all signals looming disaster for the Trump campaign. According to the detailed analysis by Arizona Christian University “approximately 204 million people under the ‘people of faith’ umbrella are not expected to vote this election, including 41 million born-again Christians and 32 million who regularly go to church.”

The research also explored the reason that those who don’t plan to vote are shunning participation this time.  Some 68% of them cite “a lack of interest in politics” with 57% mentioning dislike for both the major candidates. Most worrisome to Republican hopes are the 48% of those who intend to shun voting who say they won’t participate because they “believe that the election results will be manipulated.”

This figure indicates that the former president is ruining his own prospects of success by constantly harping on alleged Democratic efforts to “cheat” and to “steal” the election, thereby undermining the confidence (and participation rate) of his own base.

Dr. George Barna of Arizona Christian University, who has devoted his life to analyzing the attitudes and opinions of the conservative Christian community, declares that “the 32 million Christians who regularly attend church services but are not likely to vote represent a far larger margin than the combined number of votes that decided the 2020 election in key battleground states.” He also believes that the GOP candidate’s shifting and inconsistent attitudes toward abortion, not to mention his multiple indictments and convictions in embarrassing court proceedings since he left the White House, have worked to erode the near-unanimous enthusiasm among evangelicals engendered by his previous campaigns. There is also a general sense of weariness, or even exhaustion, with his enraged and apocalyptic approach to even minor political issues and his strident, vitriolic attacks on his opponents—an angry approach that may cause particular discomfort with devout believers.

With more than three weeks left before the climactic judgment day, this hard-fought race remains tight, leaving plenty of room for any number of October surprises. But if the new study proves to be accurate, and some 49% of religious believers live up to their announced intention not to vote, this defection could easily doom his chances for a new term.