During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I focused on this question: Will the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court help President Donald Trump on Election Day 2020?
The answer, you would think, is pretty obvious: Yes, since it would be another example of Trump keeping a campaign promise from 2016. Remember that famous list of potential justices he released during that tense campaign?
It’s also true that Barrett would be filling a third open chair on the high court during a single four-year term, a stunning development that few would have anticipated. Thus, Barrett’s confirmation would enthuse the Trump base and help get out the evangelical vote. Correct?
Maybe not. Consider the overture of this think piece — “The Supreme Court deal is done: Would this SCOTUS win mean that all those reluctant Trump voters could abandon ship?“ — that ran the other day at The Week. Bonnie Kristian’s logic may upset some Trump supporters, but she has a point:
The necessary and compelling reason to vote for President Trump in 2016, for many white evangelicals and other conservative Republicans, was the Supreme Court. That reason is now gone.
Or it will be soon, if Republican senators can manage to avoid COVID-19 infections long enough to confirm Amy Coney Barrett's nomination. … Her confirmation can and probably will be done before Election Day, at which point Trump's SCOTUS voters can — and, on this very basis, should — dump him as swiftly and mercilessly as he'd dump them were they no longer politically useful.
The Supreme Court vote for Trump was never a good rationale for backing him in the 2016 GOP primary, because every other candidate would have produced a very similar SCOTUS nomination shortlist. But once Trump was the party's chosen champion against Democrat Hillary Clinton, the certainty that the next president would fill at least one seat (replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia) made the Supreme Court, in the words of pundit Hugh Hewitt, "Trump's trump card on the #NeverTrumpers."
Ah! Someone paid attention to the fault line in the white evangelical vote that Christianity Today spotted early on, and that your GetReligionistas have been discussing ever since.
So, once again, let’s consider that 2016 headline at CT: “Pew: Most Evangelicals Will Vote Trump, But Not For Trump.” Here is the overture for that piece, which it would appear that very few mainstream political-desk reporters and editors noted:
More than three-quarters of self-identified white evangelicals plan to vote for Donald Trump in the fall (78%). But they aren’t happy about it.
According to a Pew Research Center survey of 1,655 registered voters released today, more than half of white evangelicals said they weren’t satisfied with their ballot options (55%), reflecting the feeling of Americans at large (58%). And 45 percent of white evangelicals said they meant their vote as opposition to Hillary Clinton, not as an endorsement of Trump.
Once again, it’s true that there were lots of evangelicals who — all together now — Just. Loved. Trump.
That was an important factor in his ascension during the primaries, when a strong core allowed him to beat a long list of other GOP contenders who split the rest of the vote. Then, in the general election there were white evangelicals who reluctantly voted for Trump, since they considered the alternative much worse.
As I wrote, in a 2018 “On Religion” column on this topic, focusing on the midterm races:
The bottom line: Most "evangelicals by belief" (59 percent) have decided they will have to use their votes to support stands on specific political and moral issues, according to a new study by Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Institute, working with LifeWay. …
One in five evangelicals said they did not vote in 2016.
A Christianity Today survey analysis — "Debunking the 81 Percent" — put it this way: The 81 percent total represented "strategic, goal-oriented and issue-oriented" voting, not mere enthusiasm for Trump.
Waves of news about this 81 percent vote have "created a simplistic, negative caricature of who evangelicals are, right now," said Ed Stetzer, director of the Billy Graham Center. "It allows lazy people to keep saying that all of those evangelicals are 'all in' for Donald Trump. … They're trying to turn Trump voters into Trump.
“Trump voters are not Trump, and that's certainly true for most evangelicals."
So, when discussing “strategic, goal-oriented” voting, what political goal would have topped the dream lists of many of those reluctant Trump voters?
As always, post Roe v. Wade, that list started with the Supreme Court, especially in an era in which journalists and many illiberal political activists have started putting scare quotes around a familiar First Amendment term — “religious liberty.”
Now we have an election in which Hillary Clinton is nowhere to be seen and, it would appear, there will be three new “conservative” justices — depending on how one defines the world “conservative” — sitting on the high court.
What happens now? Here is Kristian, once again:
I was skeptical Trump would deliver the sort of nominee(s) conservative SCOTUS voters wanted, because his personal philosophy of constitutional interpretation — if we should even dignify it with that label — is nothing like the small-government originalism or textualism they favor. But I was wrong. Trump seems to have heeded the Republican establishment here. He's turned out three nominations very pleasing to this portion of his base: Justice Neil Gorsuch for those with a libertarian edge, Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the executive authoritarians and national security hawks, and now Barrett for the social conservatives (in terms of cultural cachet, at least; her actual bench record is more complex and shows a civil libertarianism that seems to place her between Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on this measure).
Once Barrett is confirmed, then, the transaction is complete. The SCOTUS voters got what they wanted (a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court), and Trump got what he wanted (the presidency). The deal is done. And given that fact, why should SCOTUS voters support Trump again in 2020?
No one thinks that all of those reluctant Trump-voting evangelicals — half of the infamous 81% — will simply vanish into the world of idealistic third-party voting or decide to stay home, as so many did in 2016. But what if 5% or more did so? How would that affect Trump?
There were signs of a drifting away, even before the Barrett nomination. Consider the following Ryan Burge chart in a GetReligion piece that ran with this headline: “Thinking with Ryan Burge charts: Whaddaya know? Some evangelicals are rethinking Trump.”
I have also argued, for four years, that political-desk journalists needed to realize that the white-evangelical-voter monolith never existed. Anyone who read evangelical publications and knew who to follow on Twitter (religion-beat pros, mainly) could see the dividing lines from the start, especially if you were paying attention early in the 2015 primaries.
So, one more time, here is that typology that I wrote long ago (politically speaking), offering my take on the divisions among evangelicals in the era of Trump. Here is my most recent update on it:
(1) Many evangelicals supported Trump from the get-go. For them, Trump is great and everything is going GREAT.
(2) Other evangelicals may have supported Trump early on, but they have always seen him as a flawed leader — but the best available. They see him as complicated and evolving and are willing to keep their criticisms PRIVATE.
(3) There are evangelicals who moved into Trump's tent when it became obvious he would win the GOP nomination. They know that he is flawed, but they trust him to — at least — protect their interests, primarily on First Amendment issues, because it's in his political interest to do so.
(4) Then there are the lesser-of-two-evils Trump evangelicals who went his way in the general election, because they could not back Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. They have zero illusions about his character. They believe Trump's team has done some good, mixed with quite a bit of bad, especially on race and immigration. They think religious conservatives must be willing to criticize Trump — in public.
(5) There are evangelicals who never backed Trump and they never will. Many voted for third-party candidates. They welcome seeing what will happen when Trump team people are put under oath and asked hard questions. However, they are willing to admit that Trump has done some good, even if in their heart of hearts they'd rather be working with President Mike Pence.
(6) Folks on the evangelical left simply say, "No Trump, ever." Anything he touches is bad and must be rejected. …
The bottom line: Keep your eyes on camps (3) and (4). How? For starters, pay attention to the pollsters and think tanks that specialize in studying religious issues and voters.
Take this Baptist Press headline, for example, pointing to a new LifeWay study: “Half of U.S. Protestant pastors back Trump.”
#Really
Also see this must-read piece at The Atlantic, by Emma Green, of course:
How Conservatives Really Feel About Amy Coney Barrett
Even Trump-skeptical Republicans are relishing the prospect of a 6–3 Court.
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