Iowa Voters Never Lost Faith in Trump
In the GOP’s first primary race, evangelicals didn’t take much convincing to stay in his fold.
Donald Trump—the far and away GOP frontrunner—has secured a quick win in Iowa, where his campaign’s Christian rhetoric stoked his fan b…
Iowa Voters Still Have Faith in Trump
In the GOP’s first primary race, evangelicals didn’t take much convincing to stay in his fold.
Donald Trump—the far and away GOP frontrunner—has secured a quick win in Iowa, where his campaign’s Christian rhetoric stoked his fan base but disturbed some evangelical leaders.
National outlets barely waited for the ink on the ballots to dry before calling the race for Trump only 30 minutes after caucus sites closed. Some sites were still voting.
Trump won with 51 percent of the vote, more than the other candidates combined, which tracked with the final Iowa poll Saturday. The former president consistently led in the polls by around 30 points, thanks largely to support from evangelical Christians. Around half told pollsters he was their first choice.
That’s a shift from the last time Trump ran in Iowa. The state’s evangelicals weren’t excited about the foul-mouthed real estate mogul in 2016 and favored Ted Cruz, viewing Trump as “the lesser of two evils” when paired against Hillary Clinton in the election, said Jeff VanDerWerff, a political science professor at Northwestern College, a Christian college in Orange City, Iowa.
“The thing that’s just been really fascinating to me over the last eight years,” VanDerWerff told Christianity Today, “has been this slow migration and now this real embrace, it seems, of Trump. That he’s become or is seen as this instrument of God.”
Early entrance polls from CNN found that 55 percent of white evangelical Christians said they were supporting Trump.
Despite subzero temperatures, supporters heeded Trump’s call to turn out: “You can’t sit home. If you’re sick as a dog, you say, ‘Darling, I gotta make it,’ …
Nikki Haley Courts Iowa Evangelicals Amid Poll Surge
Though Trump remains the frontrunner, poll-watchers say the South Carolina Methodist is having her moment.
Veteran Iowa GOP activist Marlys Popma has gotten a call from Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign every other week for months.
Popma&r…
‘Whatever They Need’: GOP Candidates Focus on Israel Support
Debate participants appealed to Zionist evangelicals while condemning campus antisemitism.
In the first debate since war erupted in the Middle East, candidates in the third GOP presidential primary debate spent over an hour addressing the conflict …
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