Will evangelicals come out for Trump's Republican party in November?

Donald Trump was the first president to be twice divorced, to openly brag about his sexual conquests and to face serious allegations of sexual misconduct less than a month before election day. He also won thanks in large part to the support of white evangelical Christians.

According to exit polls, 80% of white evangelicals backed Trump, a margin greater than for past Republican nominees. Bob Vander Plaats, an Iowa-based evangelical activist and chief executive of the Family Leader, told the Guardian: “The reasons evangelical voters responded to Trump was a) because he was running against Hillary Clinton and b) there was a supreme court vacancy.”

Because of those factors, Vander Plaats said, there “was the intensity and urgency to make sure that Trump was voted in, so they did that”.

Clinton is not on the ballot in 2018 and Neil Gorsuch has filled the seat vacated by Antonin Scalia. Accordingly, though polls have shown steady evangelical support for Trump, such voters have been far less motivated to actually turn out and show it.

Citing Senate races in West Virginia and Indiana in particular, Chris Wilson, a top Republican pollster, said evangelical turnout had picked up in recent primaries. Trump has taken steps popular among evangelicals in recent weeks, he noted, including pulling out of the Iran deal, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ending all taxpayer funding for clinics that provide abortion.

Other factors could push turnout the other way. In the 2017 Alabama Senate race, evangelicals made up a smaller percentage of the electorate than in the last comparable race for which there were exit polls, in 2012. They were far less likely to vote for the Republican, Roy Moore, than they had been for the Republican Mitt Romney for president. In the 2012 presidential contest, Romney received 90% of the white evangelical vote in Alabama. Moore got 80%. The judge, though, was, a divisive figure who faced allegations of sexually assaulting teenage girls.

Evangelicals have been less fazed by the constant drip of scandal around Trump, including his alleged sexual encounter with and hush payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.

With a measure of understatement, one senior Republican consultant described the president “as not a prototypical evangelical candidate”. In the consultant’s view, though, Trump was “able to tap into that vein of anger out there and get those people motivated to come out even though they might not necessarily agree with him on every issue”.

Further scandals would have minimal impact, the consultant said, adding: “It’s almost going back to when he talked about shooting people in middle of Fifth Avenue: nothing shocking when it relates to him and this administration.”

The consultant, who spoke anonymously in order to speak frankly about Republican prospects in the November midterm elections, said: “Evangelicals are a little more passive than I’d like them to be … I don’t know if people are burned out or what. I’m getting the sense that there is just not a lot of excitement.”

Evangelical turnout will be crucial for Republican hopes of holding on to the Senate. Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, told the Guardian: “I think that’s a real concern ... virtually all the races where control of the Senate [is at stake are in] red states, and these states are red because you do have very strong evangelical base.”

McCrary argued that some of Trump’s recent accomplishments, such as moving the embassy, were important only to “evangelical elites”. “I don’t think that actually generated much intensity with the average voter in battleground states,” he said.

Vander Plaats thought the move might make a difference. He saw greater enthusiasm among evangelicals after this week’s ceremony in Jerusalem than before, he said. He also noted that given that “you once had a 24-hour-news cycle [and] now you have seven news cycles in one day … a lot of it is going to depend on [Trump] and those candidates running for congressional office drumming up that kind of intensity”.

Vander Plaats argued that a rise in Democratic turnout might also boost the evangelical vote: “The intensity [of] those [who] are against Trump might just kind of remind some of those voters out here of what’s up for grabs.”

It’s also possible that will not matter. As McCrary noted, Democrats anticipated that their base would be “sluggish” in 2010 and 2014 and devoted significant resources to turning them out. Republican victories came anyway.

“At some level, you just can’t breathe life into a corpse,” said McCrary. “You can’t fan the flames if the fire is out. I think that is most worrisome for Republican candidates in these states.”