Donald Trump’s decision to meet with more than 1,000 religious leaders in New York last month may finally be paying off, if a new Pew Research Center report is any indication.
Seventy-eight percent of white evangelical voters in the latest PRC poll said they are likely to vote for Trump in November, versus 17 percent who are likely to support Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Slightly more than a third of white evangelicals said they “strongly support” Trump at the moment.
Around the same time in 2012, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney drew 73 percent support among white evangelicals in his presidential campaign against President Obama, and only a quarter of white evangelicals said they “strongly supported” the former Republican presidential nominee.
Trump has spent months trying to court evangelical voters into his camp, knowing the important role they could play in helping to elect him president. According to the PRC report, white evangelicals make up one-fifth of all registered U.S. voters and about a third of self-identified Republicans.
While Trump appears to be doing as well Romney among white evangelical voters at this point in the election, he would need to capture more than 80 percent of the white evangelical electorate in November to outperform his predecessor.
The PRC poll of 1,655 registered voters was conducted June 15-26. Results contain a margin of error plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
