White evangelical support for Trump slips but still strong as midterms near

United States President Donald Trump's backing among white evangelical Protestant voters remains robust but has slipped since he retook office in January 2025, according to a new poll.

Key points

• All informed, concerning 80 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Trump in the 2024 general election.
• "She's a fanatical transgender activist, " Trump remarked at a different point in his speech, despite Andrews skewing moderate on the problem within the Democratic Party.
• The shift comes as Trump's approval rating drops to an all-time low of 31 percent.
• According to The Reuters news agency, white evangelicals were the only demographic it tracks that surpassed 60 percent backing for Trump in the final stretch of the midterms.
• Democrats remain widely favoured to take control of the US House of Representatives in the election.

Notably, a survey published this month by the news agency Reuters and research firm Ipsos identified that Trump's backing among the group had tumbled to 63 percent, down from 77 percent at the time of his second inauguration.

For context, the shift comes as Trump's approval rating drops to an all-time low of 31 percent.

When the right-wing party will seek to defend its majorities in Congress, white evangelicals are considered a key Republican demographic, and the decline could prove significant during the midterm elections on November 3.

Democrats remain widely favoured to take control of the US House of Representatives in the election. Their chances of flipping the Senate too are increasing against the backdrop of widespread discontent over affordability and the US-Israeli war on Iran.

But experts say Republicans are counting on their base to counter signs of a Democratic surge at the polls.

On Wednesday, Trump campaigned in South Carolina, located in the southern "Bible Belt", where exit polls discovered six in 10 Republican voters were white evangelicals in the 2024 presidential primary.

Trump carried the state by almost 18 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, but polls have shown Republican Senate candidate Darline Graham holding only a narrow lead over Democratic challenger Annie Andrews just two weeks ahead of the midterm vote.

As with plenty of of his campaign appearances, Trump focused his South Carolina speech on a number of social problems that resonate with conservative Christians, including policies related to transgender residents. During the rally, he referred to Andrews with an anti-transgender slur.

"She's a fanatical transgender activist, " Trump remarked at a different point in his speech, despite Andrews skewing moderate on the problem within the Democratic Party. "How the hell do you run in South Carolina? Am I in a different state?"

Long a key demographic in Trump's coalition, white evangelicals accounted for almost a third of Trump's winning coalition in 2024, according ⁠to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey and a validated-voter analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

In practice, the US president managed to maintain backing from key evangelical leaders despite a series of scandals at odds with the conservative values they espouse. Trump has faced allegations of sexual misconduct and extramarital affairs. It he denies.

All informed, concerning 80 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Trump in the 2024 general election. The demographic makes up regarding 13 percent of the overall US population.

As well as the Southern state of Texas, could be key to the Republican Party maintaining its hold on the US Senate, beyond states like South Carolina, evangelicals in the Midwestern states of Iowa and Kansas.

Christian faith leaders are challenging Republicans in a number of top races, including Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist Church pastor, in Kansas, and James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, in Texas. Both Hamilton and Talarico represent mainline Protestant denominations, not evangelical ones.

White evangelicals' voter trends are distinct from other evangelical groups. For example, Black Protestant evangelicals, a vanguard of the US civil rights movement, have remained a key Democratic voting bloc.

Still, backing for Trump among evangelicals remains robust compared with other demographic groups.

It remains unclear if shifting attitudes towards Trump would affect conservative turnout during the midterm elections, in which the US president is not on the ballot.

In practice, the drop in backing among the group was less pronounced than for Trump's overall approval rating, tumbling 14 percentage points compared with a 16-point decline among Americans overall.

For now, white evangelical support for Trump slips but still strong as midterms near remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.