Exit poll data from tens of thousands of voters allow analysts to investigate narratives surrounding the 2026 election with empirical data. For example, was the Republican collapse due in part to a loss of support from evangelicals? The answer is both no and yes.
On one hand, evangelicals supported Republicans at a rate similar to previous elections. According to the 2026 exit polls, 82% of voters who self-identified as “white evangelical or born-again Christian” voted Republican. That compares to 82% in 2024, 83% in 2022, 76% in 2020, 75% in 2018, and 81% in 2016. Even before that, 78% of evangelicals voted Republican in 2012, 74% in 2008, and 78% in 2004. Evangelical voting patterns have been remarkably steady this century, with a modest uptick in support for Republicans in the Trump era.
On the other hand, evangelicals plummeted in 2026 to 17% of the electorate. The evangelical voting share has also remained remarkably steady across time, with evangelicals providing 23% of votes in 2004, 26% in 2008, 26% in 2012, 26% in 2016, 26% in 2018, 28% in 2020, 24% in 2022, 23% in 2024. Thus, the precipitous drop to 17% in 2026 came as suddenly and sharply as a “Looney Tunes” character who overran a cliff.
One possible explanation for the drop is that evangelicals turned out in their usual numbers, but other demographics turned out more than usual. That explanation does not match the data. According to the University of Florida’s election lab, the 2026 election saw 123.5 million votes cast. That shows a slight increase over the 112.1 million votes of 2022 or the 120.3 million votes of 2018.
The vote total is still far less than the turnout in a presidential election year; there were 154.3 million votes cast in 2024, 158.5 million in 2020, and 136.8 million in 2016. (Plus, the raw number of eligible voters continues to increase over time. Thus, the raw number of votes cast in 2026 does not account for the precipitous drop in the evangelical turnout rate.)
The search for an alternate explanation leads us to calculate an estimate for exactly how many evangelicals voted. The table below takes the total votes cast from recent elections and multiplies it by the percentage of votes cast by evangelicals, according to exit polls, thus deriving the number of evangelical voters who participated in the election. The table then multiplies that number by the percentage of evangelicals who voted Republican, according to exit poll data, to calculate the number of evangelicals who voted Republican.
The results are instructive. According to these calculations, the number of evangelicals who voted reached a high in 2020, with 44.4 million casting a ballot and 33.7 million voting Republican. In 2024, the number of evangelicals who voted fell by 20.0% to 35.5 million, and the number voting Republican fell 13.7% to 29.1 million.
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Both numbers then fell by 40.8% from 2024 to 2026, when only 21.0 million evangelicals voted, including 17.2 million who voted Republican. In total, the number of evangelicals who voted fell 52.7% from 2020 to 2026, and the number who voted Republican fell by 49.0%.
Of course, someone may reasonably argue that it is more appropriate to compare the 2026 turnout to other midterm years. If we do that, we find that evangelical turnout fell by 22% in 2026, compared to the 26.9 million who voted in 2022, and the number who voted Republican fell by 22.9% from 22.3 million in 2022. Evangelical turnout in 2022 had already fallen 14.0% from the 31.3 million who voted in 2018, and the number who voted Republican in 2022 declined a modest 4.8% from the 23.5 million who voted Republican in 2018.
This decline is significant because evangelical voting patterns were effectively consistent for the previous two decades. But, from 2020 to 2026, the number of evangelicals who voted fell by half! The national vote followed no such trend.
The natural follow-up question then becomes this: why did half as many evangelicals vote in 2026?
Did half the nation’s evangelicals abruptly change their religious identity? Other polls have detected no such seismic shift.
