Abstract
Contrary to expectations of a leftward “blue wave,” there is now a largely unanticipated “red shift” of Latinx-identifying people toward Republican Party candidates. To examine this shift, data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, which features a robust sample of Latinx (Hispanic) Americans, are analyzed to study how religion contributes to the discussion of Latinx politics. Multivariate analyses reveal that Latinx Evangelical Protestants voted for President Trump and opposed his removal from office on the grounds of both articles of his first impeachment more so than other religious orientations. A postive correlation between Trump support and church attendance was also found. Both patterns indicate a religious right push for Latinxs. Scholars building on these findings are urged to more consistently distinguish Latinx voters by religious orientation and embeddedness, as they likely will have a significant impact on future political outcomes.
The political behavior of Latinx voters is the subject of much speculation amid contradictory expectations, and both Democrats and Republicans have devoted substantial resources over many years to court Latinx voters (DeSipio 1996; Francis-Fallon 2019; Madrid 2024; Soto-Vásquez 2020). Indeed, their potential significance for the electorate continues to expand. According to the Pew Research Center, the U.S. Latinx (Hispanic) population in 2020 rose to 62.1 million (Krogstad and Noe-Bustamante 2021), an increase of 23 percent over the past decade, outpacing the nation’s 7 percent overall population growth (Passel, Lopez, and Cohn 2022). Not only are there more Latinxs, but their migration patterns have also placed them more diffusely across the nation (Tienda and Fuentes 2014), making their potential political influence more salient to political outcomes at the local and state, not just national, levels (Pew Research Center 2022). Given their past voting patterns, their population growth and diffuse presence guide presumptions regarding the political power of Latinxs, prompting a variety of political observers in the United States to predict a “blue wave” of Latinx votes in more recent elections (e.g., Pastor 2016; see also Beltran 2010). However, an expected Democratic surge in the Latinx vote, especially given that the 2016 campaigns on both sides highlighted the anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric of Donald Trump, failed to emerge.
A persistent belief posits that Latinxs should be sympathetic to social agendas from the Democratic Party, whose campaign platforms routinely favor immigration and paths to citizenship, support funding for public schools and Obamacare, and push back against racial and ethnic discrimination (Cadava 2021). And demographic projections of still further increases in the American Latinx population further fuel the optimism of many who continued asking: when will the “sleeping giant” of the Latinx vote finally awake (de la Garza 2004; Judis and Teixeira 2004; Taylor et al. 2012)? However, discouragement from the political left continued through 2020 (Judis and Teixeira 2023). Results from the 2020 election showed an even higher proportion of Latinxs (32 percent) voted for President Trump, the largest proportion of Latinxs to vote for a Republican candidate since George W. Bush (although in 2008, 31 percent did vote for McCain). And beyond the 2020 election, Republicans continued to gain ground in areas with large Latinx populations that were once considered Democratic strongholds, notably Texas’ 34th District, which was won by Republican Mayra Flores in a special election in June 2022. Although Representative Flores lost her reelection in November of 2022, exit polls nationwide from the 2022 midterms found Republican candidates for the House of Representatives received 39 percent of the Latinx vote (Hartig et al. 2023). These cumulative increases point to an incontrovertible “red shift” among Latinx voters (Soto-Vásquez and Hazelton 2023).
We suggest that changing patterns in religious affiliation may provide the key to understanding the thwarted expectations for the Latinx Democrat vote. Homogenization of Latinx as a group has always been problematic, necessitating analytical care in discerning meaningful distinctions within this panethnic label, and religious affiliation is emerging as one of the most salient distinctions (Beltran 2010). This is largely due to the increased religious influence of Latinx Protestants. The share of Latinx Protestants continues to grow, as they account for about a quarter of the Latinx population, with the great majority identifying as evangelical (Mulder, Ramos, and Martí 2017). This growth is occurring alongside a correlated sharp decline in Catholic affiliation (Burge 2024; Krogstad, Alvarado, and Mohamed 2023). Evidence from the 2016 election is already indicating Latinx Protestants as a key group voting Republican in support of Donald Trump (Corral and Leal 2020). Moreover, the right-wing disinformation campaigns motivating political conservatism among White, rural, and Evangelical Americans are finding an audience among Latinx voters because of their proliferation in Spanish-language media, contributing to the swing toward Donald Trump in 2020 (Soto-Vásquez and Sánchez-Santos 2022). Scholars note Republican outreach targeting Latinx Evangelicals in particular, detecting their shared conservative social values on culture war issues such as abortion, gender roles, same-sex marriage, and attitudes toward poverty and prosperity; moreover, their higher church attendance is associated with even more conservative political preferences (see Mulder et al. 2017; Ramos 2024).
Motivated by the need to make these patterns of religious influence more legible, our study specifically examines the political support of Latinxs in the 2020 elections by religious tradition. Several scholars have already argued that religious identification serves as a distinct marker for Latinx voters (Jenkins 2020; Valdes 2020). For example, Reyes-Barriéntez (2019) proposed a theory of Latinx cultural-religious identity politics, which contends that the religious and political identities are so thickly blended that it is difficult to separate the two. Moreover, Latinx Catholics are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party, whereas Latinx Protestants are less likely to do so. To the extent that the Latinx population is declining among Catholics and increasing among Protestants, the demographic expectations of their vote may be changing decisively, as Evangelicals, the fasting growing religious group among Latinx in the United States, have been reliably Republican for decades (see Cadava 2021).
We hypothesize using existing data that Latinx Evangelical Protestants are significantly more likely to support President Trump in 2020 than Latinxs from other religious traditions, even when accounting for other key demographic controls, including nationality and political identity. This hypothesis is consistent with Martí’s (2022) argument that Latinx Protestants are in the process of undergoing a religiously informed racialization that resembles the political, social, and economic preferences of White Evangelicals. We also expect that Trump support will be more salient for Latinxs with a higher level of embeddedness in their religious congregations, a mechanism that is associated with greater political conservatism (Baker and Martí 2020) and is consistent with activity that reinforces religious agreement, peer interaction, and value saliency (Djupe and Gilbert 2009). Therefore, we also hypothesize that increased church attendance is positively correlated with voting for President Trump.
In addition, we expect that a vote for Trump includes willingness to continue supporting Trump, despite his first impeachment, which took place before the 2020 election and had two articles: abuse of power and obstruction of justice. As we seek to discern the impact of religious identity and religious embeddedness, we anticipate that Latinx Evangelical Protestants are significantly less likely to support removing Donald Trump on the grounds of both articles of his first impeachment. Similarly, we also hypothesize that increased church attendance is negatively correlated with support for both articles of impeachments as well.
Overall, using the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we find that Latinx Evangelical Protestants were significantly more likely to vote for President Trump in the 2020 election and opposes his removal from office than other Latinxs. Moreover, when we examine how congregational embeddedness affects the likelihood of voting for Trump, we find that church attendance is positively correlated with support for Trump and negatively correlated with believing Trump should be impeached on grounds of obstruction of justice. These findings support the notion that religious distinctions among Latinx voters lends insight to changing patterns of the Latinx vote, more specifically, that changing demographics involving the numerical increase and greater geographic spread of Latinx Protestants appear to be affecting American political outcomes in favor of Republicans.
Method
Data
Data for this study come from the 2020 CES, which involved 60 teams of researchers and produced a common-content sample of nearly 61,000 respondents and conducted by YouGov. The survey was administered in the fall of 2020 with a preelection questionnaire administered from September 29 to November 2 and a postelection questionnaire fielded from November 8 to December 14. The CES common content consists of nearly 61,000 and 6,978 respondents who either identified their race as Hispanic on either race question or the follow-up question asking respondents if they are of Hispanic origins. This is a unique dataset making this study possible because it contains a large enough sample of Latinxs to disaggregate them by religious tradition as well as national origin.
Dependent Variable
We used a clear and direct two-part indicator to measure support for President Trump in the 2020 election. Respondents who took the preelection questionnaire were asked, “Which candidate for President of the United States do you prefer” The potential responses were (1) “Donald Trump, the Republican,” (2) “Joe Biden, the Democrat,” (3) “other,” 4) “I won’t vote in this election,” and 5) “I’m not sure.” Those who were asked the postelection questionnaire were asked, “For which candidate for President of the United States did you vote for?” They were provided the same answer choices as those who took the preelection questionnaire with the only modification being “I won’t vote in this election” to “I did not vote in this election.” We combined these two questions to create a dichotomous dependent variable (1 = planned to or did vote for President Trump, and 0 = all other responses).
In addition to asking respondents about their vote in the 2020 election, the CES also asked respondents about President Trump’s first impeachment. We used these questions to measure of support President Trump by examining their willingness to remove him from office on account of this impeachment. Respondents were asked if they favored (1) or opposed (0) Congress’s removing President Trump from his office on the basis of the two articles of impeachment brought against him in 2020: abuse of power and obstruction of justice.
Independent Variables
Our primary variable of interest is the respondent’s religious tradition. Each respondent was asked to self-identify their religious tradition by responding to the following question: “What is your present religion, if any?” Each respondent was provided a list of 12 different religious traditions, and these traditions were recoded to match the RELTRAD typology commonly used by sociologists of religion (see Martinez, Tom, and Baker 2022; Shelton 2018; Woodberry et al. 2012). Although the traditional American RELTRAD typology has seven religious traditions, we have five different categories in our analyses, as we combine Jewish respondents with the “other” religious tradition given their small numbers within the Latinx population. Additionally, we do not have a Black Protestant category in our sample. It is worth noting that more than 18 percent of the Latinx population are Evangelical Protestants and approximately 3 percent are mainline Protestants. These numbers align with other surveys that show the percentage of Latinx Protestants identifying as evangelical are a much larger share than the national average. 1 Moreover, there is compelling evidence that among Latinx populations Protestantism in general is becoming a homogenizing cultural and political force (see Martí 2017; 2022; Mulder et al. 2017).
Church attendance is a commonly used measure of embeddedness in religious congregations and plays a role in shaping beliefs and behaviors (see Ammerman 2005; Martinez and Tamburello 2018). Religious congregations play a vital role in the Latinx communities and are venues that affect the civic, family, and personal lives of their members (Calvillo 2020; Martinez 2017; Ramos, Martí, and Mulder 2020). To measure congregational embeddedness, we used a six category ordinal response to the following question of church attendance: “Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services?” Potential responses included “more than once a week,” “once a week,” “once or twice a month,” “a few times a year,” “seldom,” and “never.” These response categories were coded so that a higher number indicated more frequent church attendance.
Control Variables
In addition to religious tradition and church attendance, we included several potentially spurious variables in our multivariate models. These controls include dichotomous measures of gender (female = 1), education (college graduate = 1), marital status (married = 1), region (South = 1), and household occupancy (living in an owned home = 1). We also controlled for the respondents’ age (in years) and household size (in number of people). Additionally, we controlled for respondent’s generation in the nation (ranging from 1 = first to 4 = third or more), as third-generation Latinxs were more likely to vote in the 2016 election (Corral and Leal 2020). The nationality of the respondent was also controlled for using the self-reported country of origin of the respondents using a system of binary variables composed of the following nations: Mexico (comparison group), the United States, Spain, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and a different nation. Finally, we use two indicators to operationalize political identity, as 2016 Latinx Trump voters were much more likely to identify as conservative than the overall Latinx population (Galbraith and Callister 2020). The first is the respondent’s political ideology (ranging from 1 = very liberal to 5 = very conservative), and the second is their party identification (ranging from 1 = strong Democrat to 7 = strong Republican).
Analytic Strategy
We present our findings in two parts. First, we present stepwise binary logistic regressions predicting the likelihood that one planned to vote to President Trump in the 2020 election. These models are presented in Table 1, which starts with the demographic controls, then adds the respondents’ nationality in model 2 and their measures of religiosity in model 3; the final model includes the controls for their political identity.
Binary Logistic Models Predicting Support for Trump in the 2020 Election.
Source: Cooperative Election Study (2020).
The comparison group is Mexico.
The comparison group is Evangelical Protestant.
p ≤ .05. **p ≤ .01. ***p ≤ .001.
Our second table includes two binary logistic regressions predicting the respondents support to remove President Trump from office for the two articles of his first impeachment, which occurred in early 2020: abuse of power and obstruction of justice.
Latinx Evangelical Protestants and Trump Support
Table 1 presents the estimates from four binary logistic regression models predicting support for President Trump in the 2020 election. Model 1 shows that almost all of the key demographic controls included are significantly correlated with supporting Trump in the 2020 election (college graduate is not significant in the first two models, but its effect becomes visible in models 3 and 4 once religiosity and political identity are included). Latinx women are less likely to support Trump than men, while Latinx individuals who are married, own a home, and live in the South are more likely to support Trump. Additionally, age and generations living in the United States are positively correlated with Trump support. Model 2 adds nationality into the models and finds that Latinx individuals from the United States and Cuba are significantly more likely to support Trump than are individuals from Mexico, which coincides with the Republican campaign since the Nixon administration to cater to the anticommunist sentiment of the Cuban American community (Francis-Fallon 2019).
Model 3 includes two measures of religiosity, and the inclusion of these variables into the models causes the r2 value to increase by more than 50 percent from the previous models. Thus, demonstrating the importance of religiosity in predicting Latinx Trump support in comparison with other important demographic controls. This model shows that Latinx Evangelical Protestantism is an independent and strong predictor of supporting Trump in the 2020 election. Among Latinx individuals, Evangelical Protestants are significantly more likely to support Trump than mainline Protestants, Catholics, members of other faiths, and religious nones. Although all the demographic controls and being from Cuba are significantly correlated with Trump support, Evangelical Protestantism has the highest predictive power of all the variables in model 3. It is also worth noting that once religiosity is included in the models, those from the South are less likely to support Trump, which suggests that the southern Latinx Trump support in the first two models is serving as a proxy for religiosity. These diverging trends across religious traditions again indicate that the American Latinx population is not a homogenous voting bloc, and we can infer the political socialization and consequent reinforcement Latinx individuals receive vary across their religious traditions.
Religious identification is clearly salient for Latinxs in supporting Trump, however identity alone does not paint the whole picture. Church attendance is positively correlated with supporting Trump net of all other controls as well. It is important to note that this relationship mirrors the patterns of White non-Hispanics. Using Pew data, Nortey (2021) identified a stark contrast in the pattern of church attendance between White and Black voters. Greater levels for attendance are correlated with supporting Trump in the 2020 election for Whites, but for Blacks, high levels of church attendance are associated with Biden support. Several studies have identified racialized effects between church attendance and Republican support, yet most of these studies do not have the ability to disaggregate the data beyond a White/non-White or White/Black binary. Therefore, a key contribution of our study is that our sample of Latinx respondents is large enough to examine the relationship between church attendance and Trump support. With these data, we find that Latinx church attendance functions in a manner that much more closely resembles Whites than Blacks.
Model 4 includes the two controls for political identity, political ideology and political party identification. Unsurprisingly, these were the two biggest predictors of supporting Trump, with identifying as politically conservative and Republican having a strong positive correlation with supporting Trump. The inclusion of these two variables causes the r2 value to increase by nearly fivefold. It is also worth noting that while the inclusion of political identify accounts for the significant relationships between Trump support with marital status, living in the South, and the generations in the United States, the relationship between Evangelical Protestantism remains a significant predictor of supporting President Trump in the 2020 election for Latinx individuals. The difference between Evangelical and mainline Protestantism is no longer significant in model 4; however, Catholics, other religions and religious nones are still significantly less likely to support Trump, while church attendance remains positively correlated with supporting him.
Support for Removing President Trump from Office
Table 2 displays two models predicting Latinx support for the two articles of President Trump’s first impeachment, which was in early 2020. Model 1 shows identifying with the Republican Party, having a conservative ideology, and being a college graduate are negatively correlated with supporting the removal of Trump on the grounds of abuse of power. Cubans are less likely than Mexicans to support removing President Trump, while Puerto Ricans are more likely to support his removal from office for abuse of power, as are women. Even when controlling for political identity, Latinx Evangelical Protestants are significantly less likely to support the president’s removal for abuse of power than Catholics, individuals from other faiths, and religious nones.
Binary Logistic Models Predicting Support for the Articles of Impeachment of President Trump in 2020.
Source: Cooperative Election Study (2020).
The comparison group is Mexico.
The comparison group is Evangelical Protestant.
p ≤ .05. **p ≤ .01. ***p ≤ .001.
Model 2 reveals a similar trend with regard to gender, education, and political identity with supporting the removal of President Trump for obstruction of justice. Additionally, age is negatively correlated with removing President Trump while married couples are more likely to support his removal for obstruction. Interestingly, there are no significant variations across nationalities with regard to this article of impeachment. Similar to the other article of impeachment, Latinx Evangelical Protestants are less likely to support the removal of Trump from office than Catholics, individuals from other faiths, and religious nones. With this article of impeachment, the more regularly a Latinx individual attends church, the less likely they are to support removing the President from office. These two models demonstrate that religious identification and church attendance are critical factors contributing to the political support of President Trump and maintaining his position despite his first impeachment.
Conclusion
Using CES data, we find that Evangelical Protestantism more so than all other religious orientations among Latinxs is significantly associated with voting for Donald Trump as well as opposing his removal from office on the grounds of both articles of impeachment, even when controlling for nationality and political identification as well as other demographic controls. Moreover, church attendance is positively correlated with voting for Trump and opposing his removal from office for obstruction of justice. Consequently, we expect Trump support among Latinxs to stay strong and follow a similar pattern, despite the number of legal indictments Trump faces. These findings lend support to a broader suggestion that Latinx Evangelical Protestants are aligning their politics with their White Evangelical brethren.
The alignment of Latinx Evangelical Protestants with White Evangelicalism remains important even if Latinx Protestants do not entirely follow every aspect of evangelical doctrine or church practice. Belief is not as important, as current patterns suggest that being “evangelical” and voting for Donald Trump express one’s political values (see Martí 2019, 2020a). According to political scientist Ryan Burge, commenting on recent Pew Research Center data for the New York Times, “many Americans who have begun to embrace the evangelical identity are people who hardly ever attend religious services.” Moreover, those who had warmer views of Mr. Trump were more likely to become evangelical between 2016 and 2020 than those who didn’t feel warmly toward him. The evidence points in one direction: For many Americans, to be a conservative Republican is to be an evangelical Christian, regardless of whether they ever attend a Sunday service.
Therefore, the alignment of Latinx Evangelical Protestants to White Evangelicals could exacerbate racial conflicts and oppressions given the historic patterns of support for policies that actualize nativist prejudices and enact long-established racism (Butler 2021; Martí 2020a, 2020b). Although our results identify a similar pattern among Latinx Evangelicals to the one Burge identified with White Evangelicals, we also found church attendance has a similar effect for Latinxs across religious traditions. Thus, the more embedded in their congregations Latinxs are, the more likely they are to support Trump with both their vote and opposition to his impeachment. Religiosity is a significant factor in understanding Latinx political outcomes, and we expect these patterns to hold true in future elections.
This study identifies a distinct correlation among Latinx Evangelicals, church attendance, and consistent support for Trump; however, there are still many questions in need of exploration. Although the Republican Party has undergone a “Trumpization” since he became a presidential candidate (Harmel, Mjelde, and Svasand 2024), support for Trump does not necessarily mean that Latinx Evangelicals will support other Republicans equally. Although there is reason to believe that support for the two will overlap, such as Republican House candidates receiving a larger share of the Latinx vote in 2022 than Trump did in 2020, the transference of support from Trump to the other Republican candidates and issues cannot be assumed. Future studies are needed to examine if Latinx Evangelicals and church attendance similarly affect support for other Republican candidates and an alignment with conservative views on sociopolitical outcomes. Additionally, more research is needed to unpack which aspects of White Evangelicalism are promoting the political convergence with the Republican Party for Latinx Evangelicals. There are likely several mechanisms at play, such as institutional alignment, access to White Evangelical leaders and materials, or perhaps evangelical theology itself, potentially influencing the culture within Latinx evangelicalism. The present research identifies the correlation among Latinx evangelicalism, church attendance, and Trump support; however, more research is needed to unpack the complexities of these relationships.
Ultimately, these empirical patterns demonstrate that it is important distinguish more finely within the generalized, panethnic category “Latinx” to trace the religious consequences to the enactment of one’s racial identity, especially in relation to their support of institutions that distribute opportunities and privilege via the exercise of the executive power of the presidency of the United States. Attention only to “the Latinx vote” will continue to reinforce the concept that Latinxs are a singular politically marketable category (see Soto-Vásquez and Gonzalez 2022), and it will continue to create confusion if the heterogeneity of the Latinx vote is not properly assessed. By distinguishing between Latinx Evangelical Protestants and others, distinct lines of political support emerge alongside the effect of church attendance in socializing and mobilizing these potential voters. Future research should sample more broadly and strategically to capture the Latinx Evangelical Protestant vote, with enough comparative groups among Latinxs, which will allow more precise measurement of stability and change in that vote over the coming election cycles.
