The race for the Republican Party’s evangelical vote is already taking shape, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears to have an early advantage over JD Vance.
As both men quietly position themselves for 2028, Politico claims that Rubio’s standing with the far-right voters may give him a head start in what could become a defining contest for the post-Trump GOP.
"[Rubio] has a great deal of trust and admiration from conservative evangelicals and an amazing story that appeals to evangelicals looking for candidates to support,” explained Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in an interview with Politico. “Marco Rubio is far better known to American evangelicals than JD Vance.”
To win the GOP nomination, a candidate must have evangelical voters. In 2024, for example, Politico noted that 82 percent of evangelicals backed President Donald Trump in 2024.
“There is no path to the nomination that doesn’t run through the tollbooth of the evangelical vote," the report said.
"And though he is Catholic," Politico noted that Rubio has managed to win over evangelicals by being friendly enough to "regularly attend a Southern Baptist megachurch in Miami."
Vance has gone in another direction, meeting with Vander Plaats during his recent trip to Iowa. Politico described him as a lesser-known evangelical.
Meanwhile, “prominent evangelicals" view Rubio as someone who could win both Trump's MAGA base as well as the Reagan-era conservative establishment that has slowly lost power in the party over the past two decades.
Vance has left "some evangelicals uncertain," the report continued. "His foreign policy instincts run toward non-interventionism — a posture that has put him at odds, at times, with the administration’s stalwart support for Israel. Rubio, by contrast, leaves little room for ambiguity."
A key piece of those in the movement are the anti-abortion activists who feel like the elimination of the landmark case Roe v. Wade was not enough. They want a full national ban.
The Susan B. Anthony organization, an anti-abortion group, has begun calling the administration the “Trump-Vance administration” in its press releases, to help boost Vance's profile at a time when an attention-hungry president can get miffed when someone steals his spotlight. They're using Vance's ambition for 2028 and his influence to try and move Trump to restrict abortion even more.
“This does not seem to be an accidental strategy, to try to be saying, ‘Come on Vance, like, use your sway with your boss,’” an anti-abortion advocate told Politico about coalition calls.