Donald Trump’s fate in the 2024 GOP presidential race may pivot on whether he can retain the surprisingly broad support he secured in 2016 from an unexpected group of Republican voters.
Probably the biggest surprise in Trump’s march to the GOP nomination in 2016 was the large number of votes he attracted among White evangelical Christians, who many analysts expected to resist a twice-divorced New Yorker who had earlier expressed support for abortion rights.
The key to that breakthrough was Trump’s success in carving a new fault line in the GOP primary electorate. Traditionally, a critical divide among Republican voters has been between those who identify as evangelical Christians and those who do not.
But Trump in 2016 split the GOP electorate more along lines of education, drawing commanding support from voters without a four-year college degree, whether or not they identified as evangelical Christians. Trump’s big margins among those non-college evangelicals proved critical in allowing him to win a series of culturally conservative states, especially across the South, that Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump’s principal rival on the right in 2016, had expected to propel him to the nomination.
If anything, those blue-collar evangelical Christians may be even more important to Trump’s prospects in 2024.
Early 2024 GOP presidential preference polls suggest Trump’s position may be even weaker than in 2016 among Republicans holding a four-year college degree, including both those who identify as evangelical Christians and those who do not.
Those skeptical attitudes mean that to hold off the challenge that may develop from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among others in a field of uncertain size, Trump likely will need to maximize his support among the non-college Republicans who have always comprised his most ardent backers. And in many Republican…
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