To no one’s great surprise, former President Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the Iowa caucuses. Journalists who flew into freezing cornfield country all knew this was going to happen, but they still had to come up with something to write during the days leading up to the event.
The reason for Trump’s victory? All those evangelicals who made up 64% of the Iowa electorate GOP electorate with minorities splitting off for either Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
However, that 64% figure, which dates back to the 2016 GOP presidential primary, was totally off, according to pollster Ryan Burge’s figures. His Monday newsletter postulated that Iowa was not near as evangelical as everyone says. In fact, Iowa is more Catholic, then Methodist and Lutheran if it’s anything, so why reporters were concentrating solely on evangelicals is a mystery.
But evangelicals were way more picturesque and out there, in terms of stumping for their guy. And they had killer memes and YouTube videos.
That’s where reporters from the mainstream media hung out before the voting. I best liked Sunday’s piece in Politico, which described how Kari Lake — who lost her bid to become governor of Arizona in 2022 despite her claim of election fraud — showed up at a well-known Des Moines church that morning to troll a DeSantis backer.
Trying to find a creative walk-up story in 48 hours before caucus/election day is difficult in the best of circumstances but here the Politico reporter is having to stake out a chilly church foyer having to interview folks while they’re rushing to get out of the cold and into a much warmer sanctuary.
“Of course I’m caucusing for President Trump,” said Judy Billings, a loyal member of the congregation, clutching her Bible as she entered the foyer. “I just love the guy. I think he’s a total hero, and he has my full support … I think he’s the only one that can win and lead our country.”
In 2016, evangelicals were a weak point for Trump in the primary. But eight years later — after the party took a hard turn toward Trump-ism — they now sit firmly in his corner. In the most recent Des Moines Register Iowa Poll released Saturday night, Trump drew support from 51 percent of evangelical Christians in Iowa who plan to attend GOP caucuses, far ahead of DeSantis at 22 percent.
Above this was a headline: “Trump consolidates evangelical vote in Iowa.”
Suffice it to say that I found no news reports about Trump or any other candidate consolidating the Catholic/Methodist/Lutheran vote. Had any of these publications used a religion reporter on these stories, they would have quickly realized that the Midwest is not the Bible Belt and that the traditional denominations actually rule the religious landscape. And that Catholics, the most numerous religious group in the state, were split between Biden and Trump in 2020, and might be anemic toward Trump this time around.
But the evangelicals were an easy target. Pet peeve here: Calling people terms like “self-described evangelical” as in this Washington Post story. Do the reporters doubt these folks are evangelical? Does the Post use that term with adherents of other faiths?
A more recent Post story noted that Trump won among evangelicals in the poorer, less educated areas of the state, whereas Haley won in the cities.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump added Iowa’s most religious regions to his strongholds in Monday’s caucuses. He combined religious areas with the state’s lower-income and less educated counties to pull a majority of all caucus voters, more than double what he earned eight years ago.
Trump dominated the caucuses in the style of other Republican winners of the past 20 years, a pattern that works in Iowa but did not propel them to win the nomination. Meanwhile, Trump’s weakest performance was in the parts of Iowa that more closely resemble the rest of the country, with fewer White evangelical Christians, fewer farmers and more people living in cities with higher education and more income.
Speaking of farmers, one thing that has caused a dust-up has been a clever move by the Trump campaign to distribute “God Made Trump,” a video that makes fun of Trump — and his followers — by presenting him as a superman. With the help of AI, broadcaster Paul Harvey’s monologue “So God Made a Farmer” is used as a voiceover to create a presentation of the former president as a messianic figure
It’s so clearly a joke, yet I’ve been amazed to see how many outlets have taken it way too seriously, as if Trump really thinks he’s the avatar of the Second Coming. See this New York Times report: “Iowa Pastors Say Video Depicting Trump as Godly Is ‘Very Concerning’.”
A group of meme makers known as the Dilley 300 Meme Team — who have grasped that the way to the hearts and minds of the under-30 set is through the clever use of social media — are behind it all. Do watch it to get some laughs. It does amuse me how, when the far right actually does something clever, the news media go nuts over it. Also watch their meme of Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.
Whereas Haley will go on to do better things in New Hampshire (Iowa was her weak spot), this was not good news for DeSantis. A column in The Spectator by Ryan Girdusky pointed out how DeSantis, who is Catholic, was out of character trying to act like an evangelical Protestant — and it showed.
As the weeks went by, I grew more frustrated. The advance team was doing a terrible job with his videos off-center with awful lighting, and he was tripling down on the Evangelical vote in Iowa. He appeared on a Christian television show, and it came off terribly to me; it took several times for DeSantis to mention he was Catholic after being asked. When asked about the Vatican, he talked about Israel. Evangelicals are not who they were in the year 2000 — many don’t go to church, most Republicans don’t go to church on a weekly basis and they’re much more transactional in how they approach politics…
I said that the advance team was an embarrassment and should be fired, the messaging was all wrong, that doubling down to try to sound like an Evangelical when he was not an Evangelical would not work and his interview on the Christian show was embarrassing.
DeSantis would do well not to try to be an evangelical in an era when even the evangelicals themselves aren’t sure who they are.
A recent New York Times piece that said today’s evangelical is a lot less churched than his/her counterpart in 2000, also said the following:
Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.
“Politics has become the master identity,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”
This is most true among white Americans, who over the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency became more likely to identify as “evangelical,” even as overall rates of church attendance declined.
But to be fair, hasn’t this been true of black evangelicals since the Civil Rights Movement?
Actually, the black church and black political action have been intertwined since the 18th century. White evangelicals have decided to work their faith out in political action as well, just as the evangelical left has been doing since the 1970s.
Not everyone (see Beth Moore’s comment above) is happy with this turn of events.
I think that — at least among white evangelicals — the love affair with Trump is going to bite them. It has already compromised major sections of evangelicalism and is poised to affect even more. Where will this all end? For those of us who cover religion, finding intelligent voices on questions like that is part of our job, isn’t it?
FIRST IMAGE: Screen shot from the YouTube video “‘God Made Trump’? Can Christians Vote for Democrats? Explained.”