One of the most powerful engines driving the Republican Party for nearly half a century quietly ran out of steam, and that silence shook the GOP to its very foundation, reports the Washington Post.
It’s difficult to quantify the contribution of late Liberty University founder and Moral Majority co-founder, Jerry Falwell, Sr., whose Bible-thumping cotilion of conservative firebrands dominated the national debate in the 1980s and beyond.
Born in Lynchburg, Virginia 1933, Falwell, Sr. was very much a product of the Jim Crow era of the Deep South. He was a rabid segregationist in the 1950s and 1960s who railed against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and insisted that, “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.”
Critics argue that Fallwell’s racism has long been a part of the Christian Right, and it was one of the driving forces of Republicans’ Southern Strategy, which drove segregationist Dixie-crats into the arms of the post-Lincoln Republican Party. They say it was also why, in 2020, far-right white evangelicals “found President Donald Trump so appealing.”
But in a starling change of times, the Washington Post reports even racism couldn’t stir white evangelicals to pull a lever for Republicans this year.
“Turnout rates among White evangelicals — a key part of the GOP base — were significantly lower during the recent midterms than in 2024, and people in those areas voted much less Republican,” said the Post, according to a new analysis.
While pollsters and political scientists are still digesting exit polls to understand all the factors behind the historic Republican rout this month, researchers at the American Communities Project scrutinized 15 states with U.S. Senate races that also have a lot of what ACP calls “evangelical hub counties.” Those are places, according to the Post, with “high concentrations of self-described evangelicals,” particularly white evangelicals.
These white “evangelical hub” counties were almost all in the Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, where white evangelicals comprise 52 percent of those counties compared with 13 percent of the country overall, according to the PRRI 2023 Census of American Religion.
But the hot air that kept those hubs sailing for decades petered down to fumes this November.
“The 343 counties’ vote was 66 percent of what it was in the 2024 presidential election,” reports the Post. “The turnout for surrounding counties in those states, ACP found, was 78 percent of the 2024 election.”
Enthusiasm in those heavily white evangelical areas “was lower than enthusiasm in other locales,” Dante Chinni, founder of ACP, told The Post, adding that if those areas had voted at rates similar to their neighbors, it would have generated hundreds of thousands more Republican votes.
Paul Binford and his wife are Kentucky evangelicals who regularly vote, and they vote GOP when they do. But this year they determined that Trump was too busy “enriching himself” to be an effective president.
“[W]e thought he might not sell us out, but he was [the] worst offender of all,” said Binford, 69.
