Bill Werts speaks to how God can change hearts at a Black Lives Matter Rally in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. | Courtesy Bill Werts
Posted on 01/18/2021 7:07:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Bill Werts grew up in rural north central Pennsylvania and always identified as an evangelical conservative. He listened to conservative radio talk shows, emulated Christian conservative politicians like Mike Pence and even participated in the March for Life in Washington, D.C. five times.
After supporting staunch conservative Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary, the 46-year-old held reservations about voting for President Donald Trump in that year’s general election considering his background, past indiscretions and what he considered to be a “racist” base the thrice-married real estate mogul tried to win over.
Bill Werts speaks to how God can change hearts at a Black Lives Matter Rally in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. | Courtesy Bill Werts
But after hearing prominent conservative leaders voice their support for Trump over then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and seeing Trump pick Pence to be his running mate, Werts reluctantly bought in.
“When Trump won the nomination, I obviously had my questions and I was determined not to vote for him. Then he nominated Mike Pence as his running mate. I thought, maybe just possibly, I am the one that is wrong,” Werts, a manufacturing supervisor, told The Christian Post in a phone interview.
“Franklin Graham is telling me I am wrong. [Pat] Robertson is telling me that I am wrong. Jerry Fallwell is telling me that I am wrong. Maybe I am the one that is wrong. With all reservations, I ended up voting for Trump.”
But four years later, Werts is not the same person politically. While witnessing the early days of the Trump presidency, Werts’ political views began to shift to the left. He switched parties in 2018. In 2020, he cast his vote for former Vice President Joe Biden as the Democrat picked up the key battleground state by less than 100,000 votes on his way to an eventual election victory.
Network exit polls seem to suggest that Werts may have been part of a small percentage of white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 but did not vote for him in 2020.
Werts said he believes many evangelical conservatives who also did not vote for Trump this time around may have voted for other Republicans in down-ballot races. But he assured that he voted Democratic in the majority of the races on his ballot.
The straw that “broke the camel’s back” for him was media coverage of how migrant children were being detained in cages (built during the Obama administration) at the southern border, which also drew responses from evangelical leaders at the time and much uproar from the left.
“But I still had my conservative leanings and still had my conservative roots and I also felt I couldn’t support Democrats,” he explained. “I guess you could say I was looking for reasons to support Democrats for the past two years. The hardest bridge for me to cross was on abortion.“
In 2018, Werts participated in a protest at a local courthouse over the Trump administration’s immigration policies, where he was connected with the progressive organization in his county called Voices of Westmoreland. 
Pennsylvania resident Bill Werts speaks at a Vote Common Good rally during the 2020 election cycle. | Vote Common Good
From there, he was influenced by more progressive thoughts and reading materials. Eventually, he spoke at a progressive Christian rally in Pittsburgh organized by the evangelical left grassroots organization Vote Common Good, which held dozens of anti-Trump rallies across the country in 2020.
Where he lives in Westmoreland County, Werts said that the vote for Trump in 2020 actually improved from 2016.
“Evangelicals that were leaving Trump were in more diverse areas,” Werts stated.
In the suburbs of Detroit, Ronald Hawthorne, a 51-year-old machinist, is a former Trump voter who participated in Vote Common Good rallies in Michigan. He even helped organize a rally of his own in Warren.
Hawthorne said he didn’t like the way Trump interacted with people, demonized media, and especially disliked how divisive the president was during the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd protests and riots.
“The way he has divided our country is just unbelievable and really disturbs me,” Hawthorne told CP. “At times, it messes with our spirit.”
From 2016 to 2020, the network exit polls suggest a small 4% decline in the white evangelical vote for Trump, leaving leading Christian conservatives to question the accuracy of exit polls.
Meanwhile, some progressive activists have argued that this small drop in the white evangelical vote as seen in the election poll may have been what cost Trump the election.
Yet, other polling has suggested that Trump’s support among white evangelicals may not have dropped considerably, if at all, and some results even suggest that a larger number of conservative Christians turned out to vote for Trump in 2020.
Conservative grassroots activists have criticized the exit polling data for not reflecting the large percentages of white evangelicals who voted for Trump in conservative states and contended that exit polls show an increase in the percentage that evangelical voters comprised of the total electorate in 2020.
The 2020 network exit polling data is conducted by Edison Research for The National Election Pool (ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC). Over 100,000 respondents were interviewed at polling locations nationwide or by phone. The data is based on a sample of 15,590.
According to ABC’s analysis of the exit polls, the data for the white evangelical self-identification question is based on answers from 3,722 respondents.
According to the polling, Trump’s support among white evangelical and born-again Christians — one of his key voting blocs — dropped from 80% in the 2016 exit poll to 76% in 2020.
Additionally, the network exit poll suggests that white evangelical support for the Democratic candidate — Biden — increased to 24% from the 16% of white evangelical voters surveyed in the 2016 exit poll who said they voted for then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The exit polling result comes as there were concerted efforts from progressive Christian grassroots groups and millions of advertising dollars spent by anti-Trump Republican groups to urge faith-based voters not to vote for Trump.
But other available polling data suggests that there may have not been a decline in the percentage of white evangelicals who voted for Trump.
Another wide-ranging election survey, the AP VoteCast, found that 81% of white evangelical likely voters voted for Trump in 2020, while 18% voted for Biden. That result is more in line with the results of the 2016 national exit poll. The AP VoteCast includes interviews with 110,485 likely voters and is adjusted to reflect preliminary vote totals with a margin of error of 0.4 percentage points.
A Pew Research Center survey from August 2018 of over 3,000 validated 2016 voters shows that only about 77% of white evangelical voters voted for Trump and 16% for Clinton. Even at 77% or 76%, Trump’s support among white evangelicals nearly mirrors the percentage of the vote the demographic has given to Republican candidates in past presidential elections.
In 2012, exit polls showed 78% of white evangelicals voted for then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney and 21% supported President Barack Obama.
In 2004, exit polls showed the same percentages (78% and 21%) of white evangelical voters voted for President George Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry.
Over the years, many have questioned the accuracy of exit polling data. Some have warned that exit polls can be misleading as there has been a push more toward cell phone interviews.
Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University who co-founded and contributes to the blog Religion in Public, warned that there is an issue with exit polling, such as the fact that they use self-identification to identify religious demographics.
“This means that this sample includes Jews, Muslims, Catholics and Buddhists who tell pollsters they are born-again,” Burge contended.
But he thinks the exit polls tell a “consistent message” when it comes to the white evangelical vote.
“I've seen several [figures] that all pegs vote share to about 76-77%. That's pretty much in line with what high-quality surveys told us a few months after the election,” Burge earlier told CP. “[Trump] won 77.4% of white evangelicals, according to the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.”
Tony Perkins, president of the national Christian conservative lobbying group Family Research Council, does not think exit polls should be relied on to determine evangelical voting behavior.
"First off, they don’t know the definition of [evangelicals]," Perkins said. "Also, they are relying on self-described evangelicals. Quite frankly, in this environment where the media is hostile toward evangelicals, do you think people are going to say they are evangelicals? Anymore, polls are very, very suspect, especially when it comes to the evangelical community. What we are finding is that people don’t respond to pollsters. People know the underlying hostility so they just avoid them or tell them what they think what they want to hear."
The national Christian conservative grassroots organization Faith & Freedom Coalition, which spent over $40 million in the 2020 election cycle, sponsored its own election-day poll, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.
The poll featured a sample size of 800 respondents with a 3.46 percentage-point margin of error. That poll found that about 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020 and that the white evangelical vote for the Democratic candidate declined to 14%.
In 2016, the same poll found that Trump received 81% of the white evangelical vote and Clinton received 18%.
Minnesota Pastor Doug Pagitt, a progressive activist who led over 90 grassroots Vote Common Good rallies in 41 states urging Christians to not vote for Trump, said he believes the 76% figure found by the network exit polls.
“Some people are debating the polling numbers. I don’t know if I believe the polls as much as I used to but I do think those are accurate,” he told CP. “There is a segment of the evangelical population — we believed it was 5% to 10% — for an off-ramp from Donald Trump.”
According to the exit polls, Biden also gained slightly more support from Catholics and nonevangelical Protestants than Clinton in 2016.
For Catholics, exit polling suggests that 52% voted for Biden, a 6-percentage point increase over the 46% of Catholics voters who said they voted for Clinton in 2016 exit polls.
The percentage of nonevangelical Protestants who voted for Biden increased from 36% to 39%.
“From my perspective, the bigger shift came not in evangelicals but actually in Catholics, mass-attending Catholics,” Faith & Freedom Coalition Executive Director Tim Head told CP. “I think for those that are actually trying to look for distinctions between 2020 and 2016, it is actually the Catholic vote that changed some. I think you have a couple of variables that factored in that.”
Pagitt, who also heads the holistic missional Christian community Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, said Vote Common Good’s $2 million campaign effort focused much of its attention to areas where there is “significant white Catholic and evangelical voting populations.”
“We wanted to see what happened in those counties because we want to see some impact in certain locations,” Pagitt said. “Evangelicals are not evenly spread all over the country. They tend to pocket and they tend to pool.”
Head said that the Public Opinion Strategies survey found that 85% of white evangelicals in Georgia, 86% in North Carolina and 88% in Florida voted for Trump while 81% voted for him nationally. But in Michigan, a state Trump lost by less than 200,000 votes in 2020 but won in 2016 by about 10,000, only 66% of white evangelicals voted for Trump.
“There was slight atrophy in Michigan,” the conservative activist admitted. “The presidential election is not a national election. It is a state-by-state election.”
Michigan is one of six states that Biden was able to flip from red to blue. In Michigan, Biden exceeded Clinton’s vote total by over 500,000.
Although Head sees Catholic voters as more of a factor in Michigan, Vote Common Good is claiming victory among evangelicals in the Wolverine State, especially in areas of West Michigan such as Holland and Grand Rapids.
Kent County in Western Michigan, where the Trump campaign spent much time and energy, including where Trump held his last campaign rally on the night before the Nov. 3 election, flipped from red to blue. Kent and neighboring Ottawa County are areas where Vote Common Good ran a billboard ad campaign.
“In Kent County, evangelicals comprise huge numbers. That city, Grand Rapids, I refer to it as the Silicon Valley of evangelicalism where you have multiple Christian colleges, the home of Betsy DeVos, the Christian publishers like Zondervan,” Pagitt stated.
“There is a whole stream of evangelicalism that comes right out of Grand Rapids. So much of the culture there is Dutch, evangelical, Reformed tradition. It is totally that subset. That is why Trump went there multiple times and so did Pence. They contended very aggressively for those votes in Michigan because they knew that if they didn’t win Kent County and Ottawa County and the surrounding counties that they were in serious trouble. The polling coming out of there was 70% evangelical support of Trump, so it was a double-digit loss.”
Vote Common Good leader Doug Pagitt, a Minnesota pastor, speaks with 2016 Donald Trump voter Ronald Hawthorne and his wife at a rally in Michigan ahead of the 2020 presidential election. | Vote Common Good
According to Vote Common Good, exit polling indicates that white evangelical support for Trump in Michigan decreased from 81% to 70% in 2020 while evangelical support for Biden increased from 14% to 29%.
But Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Head warns that the bigger flip in Michigan was actually the Catholic vote by 5 percentage points.
Head stated that for many years, Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio have harkened back to “an older Biden who was not quite as radical on abortion as he is today.”
“[Biden] has identified as a Catholic. That kind of long-term history or memory for a lot of pro-life voters, that was enough just to pull back the 3% to 5% of Catholics in the Rust Belt,” Head said. “The bottom line is your margin of error right. Michigan from 2016 until Michigan today, the Catholic vote flipping was probably the margin.”
It wasn’t just western Michigan, Biden also outperformed Clinton in the Detroit metropolitan area.
Hawthorne, who grew up in inner-city Detroit and has suffered drug and alcohol addictions at different points of his life, said he was looking for purpose when he found Christ just months before the 2016 election.
Shepherded as a young Christian by a fundamentalist Baptist church led by a pro-Trump pastor, Hawthorne said he was encouraged to vote for Trump because of the abortion issue and the types of judges Trump vowed to nominate for the Supreme Court. He recalled the pastor telling him: “They are on our side.”
Hawthorne, who has always seen himself as more of a political moderate as he has voted over the years for both Presidents Bushes, [Bill] Clinton and Obama, said he voted for Trump reluctantly. He then tuned out of politics for the next three years and focused on his spirituality. But after a conversation at work with a colleague who questioned why Christians voted for Trump, Hawthorne said he began to pay more attention to the news.
“As I started paying attention to Donald Trump, I started to see some of the things he was saying. I started looking things up and went, ‘Wow, what is going on here?’” he told CP. “I understand how the media works — right and left. I understand that. I judged him by watching him speak and things that were coming out of his mouth. I was just taken aback. When I read Proverbs 6 in the Bible, I knew I couldn’t support him.”
Proverbs 6 states: “There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”
Hawthorn said that passage made him realize Trump’s character “didn’t match the values” he had learned over the past three years.
“They were the exact opposite,” he said. “I understand he had done a lot of things and there were some [good] policies that they had passed. But my heart felt like we were being bought to get what Christians want.”
One thing that appealed to Hawthorne about Biden was his vow to make his cabinet more diverse. Hawthorne believes Biden will attempt to reach out to Republicans as he has shown in the past throughout his over four-decade political career.
Hawthorne said that there were some Trump policies that he liked, including what the president's policies did for the economy. But he couldn’t get past Trump’s “disturbing” decisions.
“I would have voted for Trump again had he just been a decent human being and acted more adult,” he added. “I would have.”
Pagitt praised the faith outreach efforts of the Biden campaign, which made concerted efforts to appeal to voters of faith who were up in the air for who they would vote for.
“I would say it was beyond lacking [in the Clinton campaign]. It was nearly hostile,” the activist pastor recalled of the 2016 election. “There was a negative amount of interest in having organized faith voters. That campaign had a number of issues when it comes to not taking faith voters seriously.”
Pagitt believes that the evangelicals that were most likely to move off Trump in 2020 were those in a more moderate stream of evangelicalism embodied by organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals, Wheaton College and the Grand Rapids-based Christian book publisher Zondervan.
He stated that the other two streams that make up the “river” of evangelicalism are charismatic Pentecostals and fundamentalist Baptists.
“The ones that we think are the most movable are ones in that first stream — that Wheaton College, Christianity Today [stream of evangelicals],” Pagitt stated.
“I bet if anyone got inside the numbers and saw who did vote for Trump in 2016 and who moved in 2020, it's going to be more from that group than the other two streams. Who stayed more consistent with Trump all the way through? It would probably be that stream of charismatic and Pentecostals. In fact, Trump’s pickup with the Hispanic vote corresponds with charismatic and Pentecostal Christians. When they did their Evangelicals for Trump work, it was predominantly inside the charismatic tradition.”
Pagitt believes while there may have been some Southern and fundamentalist Baptists that moved toward Biden in 2020, they didn’t do so as much as those in the more moderate stream of evangelicals.
“I think there is a schism inside evangelicalism as a whole that is starting to bear out some electoral fruit,” Pagitt stated.
A post-election survey conducted by Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University led by longtime evangelical pollster George Barna found that 99% of Spiritually Active Governance Engaged Conservative Christians (SAGE Cons) turned out to vote. That figure dwarfed the estimated national turnout level of 66%.
Although SAGE Cons represent just 9% of the adult population, their extreme turnout levels enabled them to constitute over 14% of the voting population, which Trump garnered 97% of, or a net of 21 million voters, according to the data.
Perkins, a social conservative activist and Baptist pastor, called SAGE Cons the "core" of the evangelical vote.
"Because the term 'evangelical' has really become elastic, we have to have a good definition to work with," he said. "Roughly 30% or less of the president’s votes — almost a third of the vote for Donald Trump — came from the SAGE Cons."
Faith & Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed, one of the leading conservative evangelical activists in the U.S., pushed back against the notion that Biden made serious inroads among evangelicals.
The activist argued in November that there are key states that show “astonishing margins for Republicans among evangelical voters.” Reed contended that Biden's gains with Catholics "made a difference in the upper Midwest."
“In North Carolina, evangelicals totaled 34 percent of all voters, and Trump won 85 percent of their votes,” he wrote. “In Texas, Trump won 86 percent of the evangelical vote; in Ohio, Democratic plans to flip the state were undone by Trump winning 82 percent of evangelical votes to Biden’s 17 percent.”
Perkins, meanwhile, pushed back against critics on the left who argue that the political reputation of evangelical conservatives has been tarnished because of their association with the president.
"They have been trying to write the obituary for conservative evangelical Christians for decades, going back to the Moral Majority," Perkins said. "You could argue that Jesus tarnished the reputation of believers because Jesus said, ‘Look, they hated me and they will hate you.’ I am not happy with the outcome of this election but I am not surprised. We have been told that we are going to have challenges in this world and we are facing them now. We can face them with confidence."
This screed belongs at a Leftist propaganda outlet not here. Take this crap and shove it.
I wonder how many will lose their jobs under a Biden administration? If they do, no sympathy here.
Another sellout.
No, it was higher. Total votes for Trump was higher. What screwed Trump was the ballot harvesting and illegal voting in a few metropolitan areas.
The media has been pushing this tired “evangelicals leaving the Republicans” since Reagan. It’s been cr@p every time.
Not sure if it is true or not, but I believe Trump did lose support because of the media’s propaganda of children in cages and other issues.
It cost him 2018
No. Ask the Democracy Institute - most accurate pollster.
That bridge is and always has been uncrossable for me (in the opposite direction).
Regards,
Trump received 12 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. He didn’t lose anything.
Somehow I doubt these people voted to have their religion ‘canceled’, regardless of whether Trump ‘tweeted’ too much for their liking.
Proof that some are given over to reprobate minds.
I’m sick of “christians” who find the motes in Trumps eye worse than the giant redwood logs in RAT’s eyes.
I'm not sure how long it took for you to format and post this, but it's a waste of time given our election was stolen.
It took them two months to find this loser
Yes I do believe they lie about Trump/Repulicans losing this voter or that voter
People DO change their voting patterns
However you never read the opposite, the guy who voted Hillary but now is a Trump fan. That article never gets written. And it would cancel out this flake’s vote so it really didn’t matter.
I’m not sure how long it took for you to format and post this, but it’s a waste of time given our election was stolen.
Stop falling for leftist clap trap garbage to keep you home and not vote.
Sure the republican party is a disaster, but we are going to have to vote to fix it. Especially the primaries, claiming it was stolen harms us more then it harms the leftists. They want you to think it was stolen. Its their tool to keep you home and under control.
The evangelical church in America is being invaded by Leftists. So many churches over this last summer pushed reading lists with books like The Color of Compromise that pushed Critical Race Theory and social justice narratives. These are books written by Leftist political activists posing as theologians. See also “woke” evangelicals like Beth Moore and David Platt
The evangelicals I know loathe the Democrat party and everything that stands with them - including the GOPE. I suspect some expand the definition of evangelical to include anyone who ever was one in the past, or who had evangelical parents.
The left knows how to spread their message, I will give them that credit
Convincing evangelicals that killing babies is a good thing is some pretty strong kool aid they are serving up
This is NOT a christian establishment.
It leans leftist in their reporting always.
I prefer FR use a little discretion and ban this site from ever being posted here. It is Not a publication that supports the Scrioptures.
I wonder how much money the Christian Post got from the CCP to turn out that piece of crap?.
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