Despite the Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives, white evangelicals and other conservative Christians turned out to vote in record capacity to help Republicans win in key gubernatorial and Senate races.
The national conservative evangelical grassroots organization Faith & Freedom Coalition, which knocked on over 2 million doors across 21 states in their voter turnout efforts this year, announced Wednesday that the 2018 election marked the “highest share of the electorate made up of conservative Christians in a mid-term election in the modern era.”
Faith & Freedom Coalition President Ralph Reed, a longtime conservative activist who served as the executive director of the Christian Coalition during the 1990s, told reporters Wednesday morning that he is “pleased” with the result of the midterms as Republicans added to their majority in the Senate.
While it is true that the Republicans will no longer control the House and will give up control in a number of state legislatures, Reed stressed that increased white evangelical turnout in states like Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Missouri helped Republicans edge out their Democrat challengers in highly competitive races.
“We had an astonishing level of evangelical voters cast their ballots,” Reed said at a press conference at the National Press Club. “This is the most ambitious and the most effective voter education, get-out-the-vote program directed at the faith-based vote in a midterm election in modern political history.”
Faith & Freedom Coalition, which expected to more than triple its spending from the 2014 midterms to 2018, commissioned a post-election survey from Public Opinion Strategies that found that white evangelicals comprised 26 percent of the electorate while conservative Christians more generally made up 35 percent of the electorate.
About 86 percent of conservative Christians said they voted for Republican candidates for Congress, while 12 percent voted for Democrats. As 80 percent of white evangelical voters said they voted for Republicans in congressional races, about 76 percent of non-white evangelicals voted for Democrats for Congress.
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith
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