As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues his 2024 presidential campaign, the crucial evangelical vote is still belongs to Donald Trump for the most part, as it did in 2016.
In his column for MSNBC, Jacques Berlinerblau writes that Republicans have only taken the White House when they had the backing of evangelicals. "George W. Bush proved that with the so-called values voters in 2004. Trump broke a 12-year GOP drought in 2016 by securing 80% of white evangelicals nationally (a huge number when you consider this group makes up more than one quarter of the American electorate)," writes Berlinerblau.
Berlinerblau goes to write that while most the GOP candidates in the 2024 field speak the language of WCE (White Conservative Evangelical), DeSantis seems to stay away from such language -- a "blunder" that "underscores growing concern about his campaign’s religious outreach."
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But DeSantis' inability to gain traction with evangelicals, or his fellow Catholics for that matter, may not entirely be his fault.
"Consider the fate and faith of former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. At the GOP debate last week, Scott and Pence, both evangelicals, were speaking their mother tongue (though Scott was code-switching for a white audience)."
Read the full op-ed at MSNBC.
