The first column shows that Trump garners a plurality of the substantial evangelical vote in each state. The second shows that, among voters who say shared religious beliefs matter, Trump’s support declines a little, and Cruz’s increases. In the third column, among the roughly one-third of voters for whom shared values are the most important candidate quality, we see that both Cruz and Marco Rubio (save in Mississippi) significantly outpoll Donald Trump.
While not all of those “values voters” are evangelicals—some may be Catholics and even a few may be Jewish—the vast majority very likely are. We might tentatively conclude, then, that those who take the moral worldview traditionally associated with evangelicalism most seriously are quite unlikely to support Trump, at least in the primaries.
We can arrive at much the same conclusion by following two other lines of argument.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member