Religion and the 2024 Election

What we know right now and what we'll be waiting to find out

On November 5, 2024, over 150 million Americans voted for a new president. While votes are still being counted (California has 87% reporting, the lowest of all 50 states), Donald Trump was able to exceed the 270 electoral vote threshold—securing 312—to become the 47th President of the United States.

In the end, he swept all 7 “swing” states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. The “blue wall” the Harris campaign aimed for did not materialize.

While there is still much to learn about what happened, we will have to wait for in-depth analyses and reports on how the electorate actually broke. However, there are some things we are already seeing that place this outcome into preliminary context.

First, it appears the United States is part of a larger, global trend where every incumbent party facing an election this year has lost vote share. In the past 70 years, this is the first time that has happened. There were some serious headwinds against Democrats, and not just in the US.

That red dot is the US in 2024. I’m sure the Democratic Party and Harris’ campaign draw little consolation from the fact that they didn’t lose as much vote share as other global incumbents. But it does appear they outperformed most—just not enough to actually win.

Second, exit polls show that Harris underperformed across a number of demographic groups compared to Biden and Clinton. Trump, obviously, improved in a number of areas. 2024 turned out to be his most diverse coalition yet. It is important to note that exit polls can be rather unreliable and so these are only early signals. We will need to wait for more substantive surveys and data to be released in order to see what really took place.

Surprisingly, Harris lost some ground with women (compared to Clinton and Biden) while Trump maintained his edge with men. Given the fall of Roe v. Wade, Harris possibly being the first woman president in the US, and Trump’s historic and ongoing denigration of women, many predicted Harris would win big among women. It just didn’t happen.

These same exit polls show Trump actually flipped the recent Democrat advantage among Latino men, and significantly closed the gap among Latina women. He also closed the gap among Black men.

Another important point that I will look forward to learning more about in the coming months is how Harris lost considerable ground among 18-29 year old voters.

And the wave of Americans expected to vote in support of Harris due to the fall of Roe v. Wade never materialized. In fact, it seems Trump improved across almost all views of abortion compared to 2020. He close the gap for the “legal in most cases” group, and expanded his upper hand in the “illegal in most cases” and “illegal in all cases” groups.

Here’s how CNN reported on this shift around abortion attitudes and how while more Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, that doesn’t mean they voted for Harris:

In 2020, about half of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. In 2024, it’s about two-thirds of Americans who say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But they didn’t necessarily tie that support to their vote for president. About half of people who say abortion should be legal in most cases supported Trump.

Third, lurking in the background of all of this, is religion. Trump again and again spoke directly to how he would defend Christians and Christianity from the forces arrayed against it. There was little doubt, after what we saw in 2016 and 2020, that white, conservative Christians and similarly aligned groups would maintain their support for Trump.

No surprise here: according to two different exit polls, Trump won 79-81% of white Evangelical Protestants, numbers right in line with 2016 and 2020.¹ But there’s more. According to the Edison/National Election Poll Exit Poll in 2024 Trump gained 20 points among Hispanic Catholics and 11 points among Hispanic Protestants compared to 2020.

Again, these numbers are preliminary, but incredibly interesting and instructive. They also align with scholars Brandon Martinez and Gerardo Marti who present evidence of a rightward shift among Hispanic Americans, and particularly due to their religion. Trump’s gain among the Hispanic American population appears to be substantial and certainly related to their religious affiliations.

Finally, I wanted to see preliminary evidence of how Christian nationalism related to the 2024 election.² Below is a scatterplot of the percent of each state that is either an Adherent or Sympathizer of Christian nationalism and the percent of the vote for Trump in each state.³ This is using data from PRRI’s recent report on Christian nationalism across all 50 states and Trump’s vote share for each state from CNN Politics’ interactive map.

There is a clear, linear relationship between the percent of a state’s population who strongly embrace or accommodate Christian nationalism, and the vote share for Trump in 2024. The correlation between Christian nationalism and voting for Trump at the state level is .86, which is incredibly strong.

I’ll continue to dig into this relationship in the coming weeks and months and will report back with more nuanced findings. But preliminary analyses show that even when I control for a lot of different factors at the state-level—even the percent of the population who identify as Republican—the overall support for Christian nationalism still matters in relation to Trump’s vote share across the state.

There is still much to learn about the 2024 election and Trump’s win. His return to the US Presidency promises to continue a tumultuous time in politics and portends a real threat to various democratic norms. He did not encourage a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, and we can rest assured he will not do so in 2028.

Whether another Trump presidency actually “pays off” for some of the groups who ushered him into a second time in office remains to be seen. At this point, we are left to wait for what comes next.

1. Thanks to Robert Jones and the team at PRRI for pulling together the publicly available exit poll numbers. These are from the Edison/National Election Poll Exit Poll and the AP/Votecast Exit Poll.

2. Again, these results are preliminary in that many states are still counting votes. My guess is little will change overall but I’ll be sure to update when that time comes.

3. Read how PRRI codes the various responses to Christian nationalism here.