Secular voters didn’t turn out for Clinton the way white evangelicals did for Trump
One question in the tumultuous 2016 presidential campaign was whether white evangelicals would “come home” to the GOP and vote for Donald Trump, given his history of divorce, crude language and lack of familiarity with the Bible.
We now know from exit polls that they did — in droves. As shown in the graph below, Trump did better among white evangelicals (81 percent) than Mitt Romney in 2012 (78 percent) or even George W. Bush in 2004 (78 percent), and far better than John McCain in 2008 (74 percent). This is a critical constituency, as white evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate in 2016.