Record Turnout of Voters of Faith in Nail-Biter Election

Evangelicals and Conservative Christians Surge to One-Third of Electorate, Backed Trump, GOP Candidates by Historic Margins

Washington, D.C. – Led by record turnout of evangelicals, voters of faith surged to the polls in a nail-biter election that is still too close to call but which has put President Trump on the precipice of re-election. Voters of faith also provided the margin of victory in key U.S. Senate races, according to network exit polls and a post-election survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.  

Self-identified evangelicals comprised 27% of the electorate and voted 81% for Trump to 14% voting for Joe Biden. This was the highest share of the electorate ever attributed to self-identified evangelicals in a presidential election since exit polling began.  Trump’s 81% of the evangelical vote tied his 2016 total, while Biden won the lowest share of the self-identified white evangelical vote ever received by a Democratic presidential nominee. The post-election survey commissioned by FFC and conducted by Public Opinion Strategies also found that 31% of the electorate self-identified as conservative Christians, and these voters cast 87% of their ballots for Trump and only 11% for Biden.      

White Catholics, one out of every six voters, voted 53% for Trump and 45% for Biden, while frequently Mass-attending Catholics voted 60% for Trump to 38% for Biden.  State exit polls showed astonishing margins for Trump among evangelicals. In Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida, Trump won self-identified evangelicals 85% to 14% for Biden.  In Texas, they voted 86% for Trump to 13% for Biden. In Michigan the evangelical vote broke 68% for Trump to 31% for Biden.    

“Voters of faith turned out in record numbers and provided an indispensable element of a conservative governing coalition,” said Tim Head, executive director of Faith & Freedom Coalition.  “Our ground game worked. Republicans cannot win without these voters, and Democrats continue to suffer for failing to appeal in a substantive way to these voters of faith.” 

Faith & Freedom undertook a data-driven $45 million campaign to educate, mobilize and turn out voters of faith. Its volunteers knocked on 5,226,247 doors, with nearly 9 million voters living in those homes, meaning FFC personally touched 40 percent of the modeled evangelical voters in the key states.  Faith & Freedom also made 10 million phone calls, sent 31 million pieces of educational mail, passed out 30 million voter guides in 127,000 churches, placed digital ads reaching 15.2 million conservative Christian voters in the battleground states, and sent tens of millions of peer-to-peer text messages to the mobile phones of voters of faith. The campaign centered on 22.6 million faith-based voters in the key states that FFC’s data analytics and micro-targeting found were socially conservative Christians and frequent churchgoers.  

About Faith & Freedom Coalition

Faith & Freedom Coalition is a faith-based public policy organization with 2.2 million members and supporters that works for pro-life and pro-family legislation, criminal justice reform, immigration reform, and education reform at the federal and state levels. Learn more about Faith & Freedom at www.ffcoalition.com.