Texas megachurch pastor Jack Graham urged parishioners at an October 11 service not to vote by party, though he did so right next to Governor Greg Abbott.
Abbott, a Republican, had just delivered a stump speech at Prestonwood Baptist Church about limiting transgender youth from participating in sports, putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and banning Sharia law in the state.
“Because God has been able to put a man in a wheelchair in the governor’s mansion, I am inspiring people across the state and across the nation every day,” Abbott said. “So, thank you all, may God bless you all, and may God show you the pathway to the voting booth to go vote in this election.”
Abbott is up for reelection and maintains a strong lead in most polls. The purpose of his presence at Prestonwood wasn’t necessarily to give him an edge in the election, nor was it to persuade undecided voters.
Rather, it was to get reliably Republican voters to turn out to vote on Election Day. This is especially important in a moment of lower satisfaction with the party’s leader, President Donald Trump, and a tight US Senate race in Texas.
Republicans are turning to this same strategy to energize these base voters in close races in other states.
“Even those who are becoming disillusioned with him, and if they were three-time Trump voters, as so many white evangelicals are, they are not going to suddenly start voting Democratic,” said religious historian Daniel K. Williams. “But they may be so discouraged and so disillusioned that they stay home.”
Pew Research Center said in an October 13 report that 73 percent of white evangelicals plan to vote for a Republican congressional candidate in the midterms. However, the share of white evangelicals who approve of Trump’s job performance dropped from 78 percent to 58 percent since the beginning of the president’s second term.
“The decline in the share of white evangelicals who approve of the way Donald Trump has handled his job as president is about the same as the decline [in approval] among US adults overall,” Gregory Smith, senior associate director of research at Pew, told CT.
Smith added the reasons for this decline are similar. In Pew’s recent survey of religious groups, white evangelicals listed the economy and “future of democracy” as their greatest concerns above other issues such as abortion or “policies related to people who are gay, lesbian, or transgender.” That ranking is similar to the overall population.
Williams said evangelicals’ attitudes today toward the Republican Party and Trump reminds him of the 2006 midterms. At the time, President George W. Bush oversaw an unpopular war in the Middle East that heightened concerns about affordability and the price of gas. Evangelicals’ approval rating for Bush at the time was 44 percent, despite 72 percent of them voting for Republican candidates for Congress, Williams said.
“Obviously, they have their own issues of concern,” Williams said. “But even though evangelicals don’t necessarily have a unique concern about AI data centers or the price of gas, their concerns are going to in some ways mirror the rest of the public.”
Another poll has also found a decline in white evangelicals’ approval for Trump.
As a result, Williams said, Republicans see it as important for politicians like Abbott to speak to crowds like Prestonwood’s to bring attention to other issues that are important to their base.
“So [they’re] going to those groups and reminding them of why they became Republicans in the first place, reminding them of what the other party stands for, allegedly, and appealing to fear,” said Williams, the author of the 2010 book God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.
A week after Abbott’s appearance at Prestonwood, Graham posted on social media about Prestonwood handing out “vote cards” at service.
“Here is one of the strategies of Prestonwood to help [ensure] victory for conservative candidates in Texas,” he said. (The Prestonwood pastor, an adviser to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, declined an interview request.)
Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Texas, has been a Prestonwood member, though he hasn’t received Graham’s endorsement. However, another group called “Pastors for Paxton” recently announced its support for the Republican nominee. The group, formed by 27 pastors who signed a letter, hope to challenge Democratic candidate James Talarico’s well-known progressive Christian platform. Talarico holds an advantage over Paxton in most polls.
In the Kansas US Senate race, Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, is locked in a tight race with Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall. A group of 100-plus United Methodist pastors endorsed Hamilton in a letter, prompting Wichita pastor Kyle Lammott to recently author an open letter against Hamilton.
“I understand that if you’re against Adam Hamilton, then you’re hoping Roger Marshall wins. Of course, I’m going to vote for the guy,” Lammott said. “I’m just not interested in putting a candidate on stage during a Sunday service and saying, ‘Hey, here’s our guy.’”
Lammott, whose church is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, an evangelical denomination founded by staunchly conservative Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, said he will urge his parishioners to go vote and there’s no “convincing” he needs to do about which candidate they should support.
Shortly after his interview with CT, however, Lammott’s church, Exodus, did host a Sunday evening service in support of Marshall and other Republican candidates. Marshall appeared on stage as well as Lammott.
Williams said that, as was the case after the 2006 midterms, evangelicals wouldn’t abandon the Republican Party en masse.
Smith said the latest results show the same is likely this time around. “We have seen for years that white evangelical voters are among the Republican Party’s strongest supporters and I don’t see anything in this data to suggest that fundamentally has changed,” he said.
