Iowa — Former President Donald Trump easily won the white evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, according to polls. In fact, the totals among white evangelicals were almost identical to their statewide totals, which suggests that this poll question — do you describe yourself as an evangelical Christian? —may not be a meaningful distinguishing factor.
A look at the map might be more telling than a look at the polls.
Sioux County was Trump’s single-best county in the 2016 general election after being his single-worst county in the 2016 caucuses. In this year’s caucuses, Trump won Sioux County, but it was one of his worst counties and was Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) single-best county.
I featured Sioux County in my 2019 book, Alienated America, because it is a place where the cultural tone is set by the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America, and it is a place that is very conservative and relatively un-Trumpy.
Sioux County is also arguably the most religious county in Iowa. It is in the top three counties by two key measures — most religious adherents per capita and most evangelical protestants per capita. It is the only county in the top three of both lists.
Eight years ago, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) won Sioux County. This year, Trump did, but again, it was one of his worst counties and a rare place where he lost multiple precincts.
Also, DeSantis won precincts in the heavily Dutch Reformed Marion County.
My interpretation: Places with a thick Christian culture resist Trumpism for a variety of reasons — mostly because in these places, daily community life is most rich and optimistic.
Similarly, the most educated parts of Iowa were less supportive of Trump in the caucuses. I wrote in Alienated America:
“In the 2016 Republican primaries and caucuses, across more than three thousand counties in the United States, only about 1 percent of counties gave Donald Trump less than 20 percent of the vote. We listed three of them above — Arlington, Alexandria, and Montgomery Counties — the most educated counties in the country. The rest, among counties with at least twenty thousand in population, are all, with one exception, exceptionally Mormon (at least 47 percent Mormon) or exceptionally Dutch (at least 25 percent Dutch).”
“So you can boil the anti-Trump places in the early primaries down to two categories: (1) the highly educated elites and (2) the tight-knit religious communities. These look like two different types of places (maybe even very different). But in a crucial sense, they’re one type of place.”
“Both [types of places] have strong institutions of civil society — local governments, churches, country clubs, garden clubs, good public school. … Those community institutions comprise the infrastructure that is necessary to support families. And the institutions in turn are supported by families. Strong families are the precondition for the good life, and for mobility — the dream, grounded in realistic hope, that no matter your starting point, you can succeed and your children can do even better.”
I think that argument still holds up, but the baseline has moved. Trump is now dominant in the Republican Party, and so it’s extraordinary when any resistance shows up.
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Also, it was Sioux County that ousted Steve King in the 2020 primaries.
The definition of conservative is changing in the Trump era. So is the definition of evangelical. To understand the lay of conservative Christian America, we’re going to need to study harder.