Is the church ready for a repeat?
After former president Donald Trump bested former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the GOP primary outcome that many have expected all along may soon be here.
“This race consolidated faster than any race I can remember,” Dan Darling, director of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, told Christianity Today. “It’s feeling a little bit like an incumbent candidacy.”
Haley outlasted a large field of presidential hopefuls, but after a second-place finish in the Granite State, her underdog campaign may soon run out of road, political analysts say.
“New Hampshire has a much more moderate and much less religious electorate than South Carolina, and she still could not win,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “The bottom line is that I think she needed to do better in New Hampshire to demonstrate wider appeal among the base Republican electorate.”
In New Hampshire, she also performed well with college graduates and self-identifying moderate and independent voters. But nearly 9 in 10 of New Hampshire voters who considered themselves “very conservative” supported Trump, The Washington Post’s exit polling found. And white evangelical Christians—about 20 percent of voters in the contest—went for Trump by 70 percent.
Trump won support from a strong majority of white evangelical voters in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, but his popularity also heightened ideological divisions within churches.
“Christians should be preparing now for a really divisive and contentious campaign season,” …
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