Trump may have lost some Christian voters because he made them feel like marks: report

One of the key reasons that President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election was that he won over a small but significant number of white Christian voters who shunned Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Politico reports that some in the Trump campaign believe that President Donald Trump's approach to dealing with Christian voters was so cynical that many of them felt they were being treated like marks.

"Some aides blamed the president’s inability to garner the same levels of support this cycle on his transactional view of religious voters, suggesting white evangelicals and Catholics in some parts of the country may have felt taken advantage of," Politico writes. "Others accused the Trump campaign of becoming complacent in a race that saw unprecedented outreach by the Democratic nominee to evangelical and Catholic voters."

One Trump campaign adviser tells Politico that Biden had some real appeal to Christian voters that Republicans foolishly overlooked.

"[We] should never again assume white evangelicals can’t be persuaded by the right candidate with a D next to his or her name," they said.

Michael Wear, a former faith adviser to President Barack Obama, tells Politico that the Biden campaign's outreach to Christian voters put him over the top in key states.

"To be clear, if Biden would have performed as poorly as Clinton did four years ago among white evangelicals, he would have lost Georgia and this election," he said.