Donald Trump’s fate in the 2024 GOP presidential race may pivot on whether he can retain the surprisingly broad support he secured in 2016 from an unexpected group of Republican voters.
Probably the biggest surprise in Trump’s march to the GOP nomination in 2016 was the large number of votes he attracted among White evangelical Christians, who many analysts expected to resist a twice-divorced New Yorker who had earlier expressed support for abortion rights. The key to that breakthrough was Trump’s success in carving a new fault line in the GOP primary electorate. Traditionally, a critical divide among Republican voters has been between those who identify as evangelical Christians and those who do not. But Trump in 2016 split the GOP electorate more along lines of education, drawing commanding support from voters without a four-year college degree, whether or not they identified as evangelical Christians. …
With some prominent evangelical figures joining other GOP leaders in openly suggesting the party should move on from Trump in 2024, the former president will find it difficult to build a winning primary coalition if he cannot replicate the elevated level of blue-collar evangelical support he achieved in his stunning race to the nomination in 2016. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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