‘It’s disastrous’: White evangelicals waver after Trump’s shifts on abortion

When Donald Trump in 2016 promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, white evangelicals made an uneasy bargain — and hoped he meant what he said.

Now, eight years later, they’re hoping he doesn’t.

Trump, who decades ago described himself as “pro-choice” and then, as president, appointed the judges who cemented Roe’s demise, has long been all over the map on abortion. But for anti-abortion activists, Trump’s shifting rhetoric over the last two weeks has been particularly fraught. And it’s leaving some of his staunchest white evangelical backers fearful that some of their voters may stay home in November, tipping the scales toward Vice President Kamala Harris in battleground states and potentially costing Trump the election.

“It’s disastrous that he’s attempted to run against his own track record,” said Albert Mohler, a prominent evangelical and head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “There is a real danger to the Trump campaign that pro-life voters just don’t turn out for him with the intensity that he needs.”

Trump’s announcement last week that he planned to vote “no” on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution represented a quick course correction after he sent evangelicals and anti-abortion groups into a panic by implying he might vote to undo the state’s current six-week abortion ban. And that wasn’t his only affront to anti-abortion advocates. In recent days, he has pledged to make health insurance companies or the government cover in vitro fertilization, which many anti-abortion advocates object to as currently practiced in the U.S., free of charge. And he promised to be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

His remarks are the latest example of how Trump has struggled to navigate an issue that has dogged Republicans for the last two years — and one that Democrats have been eager to exploit. But some of the former president’s allies warn that his attempt to moderate his position on abortion threatens to alienate a significant number of evangelical voters.

And, they argue, he needs to give them a reason to vote for him, not just against Harris.

“You’ve got to be more than voting against someone. You’ve got to be voting for what someone else has to offer. It’s just on the margins, but it’s the difference in many elections,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Not just voting against a set of ideas and policies and the personality to actually be for a set of policies and principles that you are enthusiastic about, that makes the difference in elections, and that’s where we’re not at yet.”

Trump’s challenges with evangelicals underscore a broader problem he has with parts of the GOP base. Even as elected Republicans up and down the ballot have lined up behind Trump, some in the base still have significant reservations about him and cast their ballots for candidates like Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during the Republican primary.

Just this week, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney announced that she’ll be voting for Harris, warning of the “danger” she says Trump poses after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump selected as his running mate in 2016 in part to shore up the votes of social conservatives, has said he won’t endorse Trump.

Perkins and Mohler are among the evangelicals arguing that Trump needs to be specific about what actions he would take on abortion as president — from making conservative judicial and cabinet appointments to ensuring no federal funding will pay for abortions, either at home or abroad — or else risk hemorrhaging evangelical votes.

Abortion helped galvanize white evangelicals to get involved in politics in the 1970s, in the era of televangelist Jerry Falwell and the rise of Moral Majority, and they remain a core part of the Republican Party base.

But evangelical leaders warn that’s no guarantee their rank and file will stay involved in politics if Republicans abandon socially conservative issues, like abortion and gay marriage, even as they lean in on others, like banning transgender kids from participating in youth sports. In July, Trump nearly sparked a platform fight at the Republican National Convention over language that couched abortion as primarily in the hands of the states, a position anti-abortion advocates almost uniformly oppose.

A recent Fox News poll shows the former president at 75 percent with white evangelicals — a bit shy of his support with the group in 2020. While Black evangelicals have long aligned most with the Democratic Party, their white counterparts remain staunchly conservative.

Strategists from both parties estimate that Trump can’t win without the support of 80 percent of white evangelicals nationally — and it’s far from certain he will get it.

“I know theologically conservative and politically conservative evangelicals who are not going to vote for Donald Trump — and not a small number. The message I would send to the campaign is: Do not do anything to add to that number,” said Andrew Walker, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a professor of Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

All of this has Democrats wondering whether Harris can capitalize on Trump’s stumbles with one of his core constituencies.

“For all the talk of Trump’s strength with white evangelicals, that strength declined considerably in 2020,” said Michael Wear, Barack Obama’s former faith outreach adviser and the founder, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life. “The question is whether it’s set to rebound now that Trump is running as an opposition candidate again.”

A spokesperson for the Harris campaign declined to comment.

In 2020, now-President Joe Biden won the second-highest percentage of white evangelicals of any Democrat of this century, second only to Obama in 2008, according to CNN exit polls — amounting to millions of votes.

“If Harris improves upon those numbers, she wins,” Wear said. “She’ll win Georgia. She’ll win Michigan.”

It’s not clear Harris, who is herself a Baptist, will make an explicit play for white evangelical voters.

“The Harris campaign clearly believes that in the post-Dobbs landscape the correct approach on both substance and politics is to draw bright, stark lines on abortion and to not allow Trump to muddy the waters on this issue,” Wear said. “This approach might gain more than it loses in this political environment.”

Texas state Rep. James Talarico, the Austin Democrat and seminarian who appeared as a Harris surrogate on recent Evangelicals for Harris and Christians for Kamala calls, suggested Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, could do more to woo this voting bloc.

“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring more white Christians, and in particular, white evangelicals, into our pro-democracy coalition,” Talarico said. “Just not voting for Trump is not enough for me. I want them to feel that they have a place in our party and in our coalition.”

Asked about potential erosion among evangelicals, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign pointed to his Believers for Trump coalition, citing the endorsement of 1,000 pastors and its 2,000 church captains aimed at getting their fellow parishioners to the polls.

“We’re confident that when evangelicals who love God and family and country are faced with a binary choice of voting for President Trump who stood strongly for religious freedom and life and liberty in his first term versus radical Kamala Harris who is a dangerous liberal and supports abortion after birth,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “We are confident those voters are going to turn out in historic numbers for President Trump.”

Some Trump boosters believe the contrast with Harris, who supports codifying Roe at the federal level and is a vocal proponent of abortion rights, is enough to get rank-and-file white evangelicals out to the polls. They argue it’s an easier distinction to paint with Harris as the Democratic nominee than it was with Biden, a devout Catholic who has been long uncomfortable with even uttering the word “abortion.”

“Kamala Harris is not only comfortable with that, but it seems to be in her wheelhouse,” said Ralph Reed, a Trump ally and chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which plans to send 30 million pieces of voter education mail, distribute millions of voter guides to 113,000 churches and knock on 10 million doors “to make sure that these voters of faith are up to speed on that contrast” between Harris and Trump on abortion.

Harris’ “extreme” abortion position “does not play among evangelical voters, but even more importantly it doesn’t play among blue collar, ethnic Roman Catholic voters in the upper Midwest who are likely to decide the outcome of this election,” he added, saying that Trump should focus on talking about the economy, the border and foreign policy.

And many Republican strategists believe that for whatever hand-wringing evangelical voters are experiencing now, they are still likely to turn out to the polls en masse for Trump in November. Polling from Fox News at this same point in 2020 showed a similar level of evangelical support the former president has today, an indication that Trump still has time to persuade them.

“Evangelical voters here and probably across the Sun Belt and the country are looking at some of these positions and statements that Donald Trump is making with a raised eyebrow,” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican strategist in Georgia, where more than a third percent of the population identifies as evangelical Protestants. “But at the end of the day, I just think those folks are probably going to come home for him.”