The Voters Forgot God's Plan (with McKay Coppins)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we're talking about faith in politics, specifically evangelical Christians who vote Republican. Now, there's no doubt evangelical Christians form a meaningful chunk of the GOP base, a full 30% as of 2020, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

And back in 2016, many were shocked to find that Trump's notable lack of moral character didn't seem to faze Christian voters. In fact, they became some of his most devoted supporters. Today, we're going to hear from a group of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and talk about how they're sizing up GOP candidates for 2024, especially fellow Christian Mike Pence, who puts his faith front and center.

My guest today is McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of The Wilderness, deep inside the Republican Party's combative, contentious, chaotic quest to take back the White House. McKay, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

Now, we're going to spend a lot of this show talking about the role religion plays in American politics and specifically the Republican Party. But we need to talk a bit about your reporting on Trump recently. You're out with a piece in The Atlantic on the most MAGA CPAC ever. You said in your decade of covering the event, you've never seen it more dead. Just tell us what you saw at CPAC.

Yeah, I mean, I was struck by two things. One was how fully Trump had captured the institution, right? Like everything about it from the swag that was being handed out to the booths that were set up in the exhibit halls to the speakers who were chosen, all of it was just kind of like,

a MAGA pep rally. And that was not always the case. When I first started covering it, it used to be this kind of place where you would have all the different factions of conservatism show up and sort of like battle it out, right? So you had like the Ron Paul libertarians rigging the straw poll for Ron Paul. And you had the social conservatives with like pro-life signs. And you had more establishment Republicans and

And a lot of the tension between those groups was what made the event kind of worthwhile and memorable. This event was fully a three-day MAGA pep rally. And, you know, a lot of the big stars in the Republican Party didn't even bother to show up, most notably Ron DeSantis.

Trump, you know, was everywhere. He obviously spoke the last night of the event. But the second thing that struck me about the event was how dead it was. Like, I think without the tension of the different groups of the Republican Party kind of competing, it made the event kind of boring. But then the other thing was just like talking to people there. You could sense an undercurrent of ambivalence about Trump's 2024 campaign.

that frankly, I think has also come up in some of these focus groups you've let me sit in on. But like, even people who are ostensibly pro-Trump and excited to hear him speak, when you kind of started talking to them, they'd say, yeah, but you know, it is possible that his four years have come and gone and maybe it's time to move on to somebody else. And there just really was a lack of energy that was pretty palpable to me.

So there was like a lot of discussion on the Twitters about the crowd size and people were quick to sort of show the ballrooms pretty empty. And even for Trump's speech, which must have been the most well-attended speech.

part of the whole conference still had a lot of the seating in the back was open. Is that real or was that people working with the cameras? No, the ballroom wasn't full. And my colleague, John Hendrickson, who also went, he had one of those videos that kind of went viral on Twitter. The back of the ballroom was not full. So it's probably like two thirds full.

I did see reporting that sponsors who had booths in the exhibit hall were kind of grumbling that the turnout was down from years past. I could definitely sense that there were not as many people there. It didn't feel quite like the big marquee conservative political event that it has in years past. And again, I think that this might have been a strategic mistake by the Conservative Political Action Conference. I think

They made a decision in the Trump years to just fully hitch the event and their whole kind of organization to the Trump wagon. And it's not clear that's where all of Republican voters are anymore. And I think the institution has struggled to kind of catch up to that reality.

And how much of that is just Matt Schlapp being so tied to Trump and like linking their careers and now because he's also in some real hot water, you know, really needing Trump to stand by him in this moment. Like, was that a big dynamic? I definitely think that was part of it. Matt Schlapp is the chairman of CPAC. And for listeners who don't know, he was recently accused of groping a male aide to Herschel Walker.

He denies that allegation, but that scandal is kind of swirling around him. And I'm sure he's kind of made the decision that he's just going to double down with his allies, which include Trump and Trump's various cohorts. But again, like I actually think, though, that the decision CPAC has made is emblematic of where a lot of the party is, which is like the party is in this weird limbo where Trump is running again.

he still demands to be the center of attention, but there isn't as much natural enthusiasm for him as there was in 2016. I think a lot of Republican leaders, conservative movement leaders, they're trying to like recapture that feeling of 2016, 2017, when Trump was this like unstoppable,

once-in-a-generation political phenomenon who is, you know, proving all the haters wrong and saying things that have never been said by a politician anymore. We're six years into this. That's just not the case anymore. Trump's schtick, you know, people are used to it.

Whether they're bored with it or not is a matter of interpretation. I felt like I sensed a lot of boredom in my reporting there. But if nothing else, people are kind of inured to it. They don't act shocked when Donald Trump says something outrageous in a speech at CPAC. It's kind of just the default now of conservative rhetoric.

Yeah, that's right. It's not just that they've heard Trump's act. It's that that act has been much replicated. And so, you know, Carrie Lake's there doing it, too. She's got her own version. And so does Marjorie Taylor Greene. And so does even Ron DeSantis. And so I always say this. It's like Trump, the man, can lose altitude while Trumpism is still kind of ascendant.

And exactly. Almost a victim of his own success. Totally. Like he basically has remade the Republican Party in his image. But now that makes him way less interesting. That's right. That's what he's struggling with.

And also, like, there are younger, sassier versions. Like, for all the talk about Joe Biden's age, sometimes people forget that Donald Trump's no spring chicken himself. Okay, we'll talk about Trump a little bit more, but I want to start talking about religion and the role it plays in the party. I'll just say for myself, I grew up a small-town Methodist, but, you know, like REM, I lost my religion somewhere along the way. And so I'm not, like, an active churchgoer, but I've always felt like I sort of intuitively understood religion

the evangelical or just religious part of the right because I felt like I kind of grew up around it and I sang in the church choir and it was like a way that I was brought up. A lot of the people in these groups, they talk about, you know, growing up in religious households. I wouldn't say I grew up in a religious household, but I grew up in a religious town and we participated.

And so I often feel like I know these people and you too, right? Faith has been very important to you. Talk about how it shaped you. Yeah, I grew up practicing Latter-day Saint, Mormon is the colloquial term, and still am a practicing Mormon. I still go to church every week with my family.

I also served a Mormon mission in Texas in the Bible Belt, where, as you can imagine, Mormon missionaries are maybe not the most popular people in the Dallas suburbs. But I did get to know a lot of conservative evangelicals during my two years in Texas. And I feel like I also...

really do understand how religion can inform every aspect of your life, including your politics. And so like, I've always tried to approach my reporting on religion and politics from a place of empathy and curiosity. I've written a lot of stories about evangelical voters, conservative Christian voters that profiled people like Mike Pence. I never go into those stories like read

ready to just like wallop them or like make a joke out of them, because I think I actually can empathize with a lot of how they're feeling. That's part of why I was so interested to listen into these focus groups, because I really think like I could understand where they were coming from in a lot of ways, while also being surprised by some of the conclusions they had come to.

Yeah, well, let's jump into that. We asked this group and we screened to get two-time Trump voters who identified as evangelical Christians. And we just asked them as a kind of level set, you know, how does your faith inform your politics? And here's what they said.

I'm a Christian. I was raised in a Christian household, so grew up always going to church to go to church. So conservative values were always instilled into me. I mean, I believe that the Republican Party most represents those values. So that's how I vote.

I actually worked for the church, but I did not grow up in a believing family. I've got a lot of mess in my background. But politically-wise, my faith, it's the greater good for the country in my biblical values and constitutional values, really. Who's going to stand up for the Constitution? Because that's what our country should be operated by.

Also grew up in a Christian household. We are, you know, very much at our church all the time, still very involved. I think there are issues like the pro-life versus pro-choice issues.

We're definitely religion, I think, plays a part in that and some other issues that are going on right now. So I definitely think it plays a part in who you want to see take that office, knowing that, like somebody else said, they're going to be choosing new Supreme Court justices and where you kind of want this nation going based on Christian views.

So, you know, I do two-time Trump voters all the time. Like, that is just a constant group that I'm talking to as people who listen to this podcast. And there's people who talk about faith in those groups all the time. This is the first time, though, that I think we've screened exclusively for evangelical Christians in the groups. But I got to tell you, by and large, they sound exactly like every other Republican group that I've done of two-time Trump voters. And I was wondering if there was anything about...

how they talked about faith and politics that struck you as interesting about how it informed their politics. It's a difficult question because you're right that like,

they had come to the same conclusions that I think basically your average conservative Republican would arrive at, right? Like policy-wise, politically, they did not sound that different than the last focus group, for example, I sat in on, which was not screened for evangelicals, but was two-time Trump voters. You know, they liked Ron DeSantis. They kind of had more or less the same political policy profile as everybody else.

But I do think they kind of like...

had to grapple with certain issues in a different way that I felt like I could understand as a person of faith myself. So like, you know, when they were asked about questions about like the moral character of political candidates, all of them kind of had talked themselves into voting for Donald Trump, but you could sense some kind of ambivalence about it, at least some like reluctance to fully endorse his character. Same with like when some questions about immigration and refugees came up,

all of them had more or less, I think, a pretty restrictionist approach to immigration. But the way they talked about it, you could sense that they were trying to square it with like Christian ideals of compassion and charity and helping those in need. And again, not that it necessarily led them to arrive at a different conclusion, but I do think they might have taken a slightly different path to get there.

Yeah, you know, one of the things I think about with in this past, you know, seven years is that it feels like in the before times that, you know,

Republican politicians were very careful and intentional about meeting these kinds of voters where they are, meaning that they wanted to sort of reflect their values back to them. And that was part of the reason that the Republican Party had this idea of character counting, that morality mattered. What I was struck by is how it seems like the opposite is now true, where Trump actually, you could see his impact all over them in terms of them

they've done a lot of rationalizing, right? Like rather than Republican politicians now coming to meet them, these voters have sort of changed where they now have a sense of, well, I don't necessarily need this person to reflect my values because they've already made that compromise. Like you remember the before times. I mean, it's hard to overstate how central this block of voters is to shaping who the Republican party was before, right? I mean, talk about that a little bit.

Well, one of my favorite stats of the Trump era was that as recently as 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 30% of white evangelicals believed that an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.

So only 30% agreed with that statement in 2011. By the time Donald Trump was running in 2016, that number had risen to 72%.

I remember talking to Robert P. Jones, who runs the institute there. He said, like, this is really a sea change in evangelical ethics. And I think that, like, it speaks to what you're describing, that there was just this kind of mass rationalization that occurred within the base of the Republican Party.

that around the time of Trump's rise that changed the way they evaluated candidates. But just to answer your question more directly, 10 years ago, like the Republican base was, if not dominated by white evangelicals, very influenced by their thinking and the way that they talked, right? Like this is why you had Republican candidates who didn't only talk about social conservative policies. They felt like they had to project ideas

In their personal lives, in their family lives, in their campaign literature, in their interviews, everything, they had to project a certain ideal of kind of like moral Christian conservative family life, right? Yeah.

And that just isn't the case anymore. And I thought it was so fascinating listening to the voters in this focus group kind of talk about that, where, you know, some of the more younger, there were, I think, a couple in their, like, early 30s who probably, like, barely remember that period or maybe weren't as politically active. But a lot of the older people had lived through the Clinton years.

right? Like they had lived through the period when Bill Clinton's affairs and his affairs, specifically with Monica Lewinsky, was the single most shameful thing that any president had ever done. They had polluted politics in America, American culture. He had stained the Oval Office. And this was the rhetoric that was very common in the 1990s and the early 2000s, George W. Bush, right? So it was interesting to hear these voters kind of

who had lived through that period, probably held those beliefs at some point, now kind of talk themselves into the idea that it was okay to vote for somebody who in their personal life doesn't live the values at all that they believe in. And the most interesting rationalization I heard, and I heard it from a few people, was

that every politician is morally deficient in some way, right? That like Donald Trump is probably more upfront about it. And they all kind of said, you know, I don't agree with everything Donald Trump does in his personal life. I think one of those said, that's probably true of nine out of 10 political candidates. So we just have to make peace with the fact that our candidates aren't going to live Christian values in their personal life and just vote for the person who has the best policies and the best experience. Yeah, you're doing a great job.

summing up exactly what these voters are saying. And I cannot tell you as an 18-year-old in 1998 that Bill Clinton's situation was incredibly formative for me and brought me to the Republican Party. I liked the idea that character counted and that it mattered. And it's so funny listening to these voters because they were the reason that so many people thought Donald Trump was an impossibility in the Republican Party, because we were all so certain that they would not tolerate

his legion moral failings. But of course they did. And I think that's one of the big shifts in American politics over the last decade is now like these voters are cynical, we're all cynical, and everybody's lost the sense that morality matters at all in our politics, which brings us to

Mike Pence. So you wrote a feature on Mike Pence a few years ago that was really interesting. The title is God's Plan for Mike Pence. And one of your sources, evangelical leader Ralph Reed, suggested that if you're Mike Pence and you believe what he believes, you know God had a plan. It sounds like he's suggesting that Pence might think that it's God's plan for him to be president. And so do you think that

Pence sort of has this manifest destiny feeling that seems to be kind of peppered throughout your reporting over the years. Is that what's propelling him? You know, I remember when I was reporting that feature, I talked to a bunch of people who were close to him, friends with him, had known him throughout his life.

And that was one of the most common kind of recurring themes was that Pence was, first of all, much more ambitious than people realized. Right. He has this kind of like, ah, shucks, you know, modest persona. But the truth is that he is extremely ambitious, as ambitious as any other person.

you know, successful politician, that he wants to be president, has wanted to be president for a long time, and that the very unique circumstances of 2016 that led to him not only being chosen for the Republican ticket, but then being elected,

you know, a lot of people in Pence's life believed or speculated that this was the product of divine intervention, right? That God had placed him in this moment and that he had arrived at his office because it was part of God's plan. And that, I think that belief fueled a lot of the self-justification he did throughout the Trump years. You know, Pence was

the most kind of loyal aid ally acolyte of Trump's throughout those years. He would defend anything. He would excuse anything. He would be kind of the first person to get on TV and talk about how Donald Trump was a great man and a moral man and how they prayed together. He kind of vouched for Trump's character constantly in moments of controversy, right? And a

A lot of people in Pence's life believe that that was because he made that calculation that like, this is how I become president. I have to stay on the right side of Donald Trump. I have to stay on the right side of his supporters. And eventually Trump's presidency will be over and it'll be my turn and I'll be rewarded for that loyalty, which is why I think where Pence is now is so fascinating. Well, yeah, I mean, God may have a plan, but I got to tell you, the voters sound like they have a different one. And let's listen.

I guess I'm sort of neutral, but I don't think he would have a shot because even though he was vice president for four years, I mean, we're all saying we still don't really know a whole lot about him. I don't like how Trump was like just in your face with everything. But then Pence is almost too far in the other direction. You don't know anything about him.

I can't give a single detail. I know what he looks like, but I never saw him do anything specific. I almost feel like he's the Donald Trump equivalent of Kamala Harris, where I can't name a single thing that she's done. I do know that a lot of the Trump base saw that as kind of him being a little turncoat if they didn't agree with the results, that he was just saying, go ahead and do the peaceful transfer of power. I don't think he has a chance. It's a shame.

I guess he seems like a perfectly nice man, but I don't think he has a chance. I'm having a hard time backing Pence right now. And I can't tell you why other than just maybe my gut. But I felt like that in 16 that he was, you know, a good partner. I thought having him on the ticket with his faith background was good, but then it didn't seem to pan into anything. So going forward, not having him on that ticket in future times, I don't know.

He's almost become too entrenched in the establishment as well, it feels like. Okay. So, okay. But hold on. And it's going to get worse. So this was one group. This was just the evangelical group. And I was very interested to know how an evangelical group specifically sounded because here's just some random selections from the last few groups we've done where we've asked about Pence. Listen to these.

I think very highly of him because of his Christian beliefs and think that he is a very honorable man. But I'm just not sure, like the way he didn't back Trump to me, that does not. Yeah, I don't like the way he turned on Trump. I don't know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point. I think he's alienated everyone, maybe accidentally. He might have done it with the best of intentions.

I think taking the job as vice president for Donald Trump at the time with not much known was an honorable thing to do. He served well, and then he probably acted as honorably as possible on January 6th. But in the process, he has alienated every Republican and Democrat. It's just over. It's retirement time.

He's a nice guy. I don't think he would win, so. Nice guy's finished last. He's not got good enough charisma. Puppet. Now I've actually had a chance to spend some time with his brother and his whole family, actually. They're actually nice people. I'm so mad at Pence that I would never vote for him. He'd be a horrible president.

But I don't think he's a bad person. I just don't think he has leadership qualities to be president. Yeah. And that's really it. Right. He didn't have the leadership qualities to do what everyone wanted him to do on January 6th. He doesn't have that spine. They seem like perfectly great people, but I don't think he was presidential or vice presidential material.

Okay. My God. Brutal. I mean, that is brutal. And McKay, I need you to back me up here on something because Mike Pence has clearly has a very strong PR department because reporters call me all the time, which means he's getting people to write stories about him. And they're always like, so what do people in the folks group say about Mike Pence? And I'm like, this...

They are brutal about Mike Pence. And people are like, really? And you sort of and I sort of had the same thing where you were kind of like interested in what they might say. And I was like, I'm telling you, they say absolutely not. And then your experience bore that out. Yes.

You told me so. And you, you were exactly right. I mean, it's funny because the reason it came up with as a possible story for me was that you look at the Republican primary polls and, you know, it's Trump and DeSantis way up there, but then like Pence always has like around like 7% of the vote. Right. So you could look at that and say, oh, well,

Pence is lurking, right? Like maybe he catches fire at the right time or something happens and he's already got a solid base of support. I wanted to know who those 7% of voters were. I didn't see a single one in these focus groups. And I have yet to be able to find one in the wild when I go to places like CPAC. I don't know who that 7% of voters is. I imagine a lot of it is just name recognition, right? But

the fact that people not only are not interested in him running for president, but like are so dismissive is really kind of an indictment of Pence's whole strategy going into this, right? He thought that he was going to build a profile with the conservative base by serving with Trump. And instead, I think what happened, and I mean, I'm curious to hear your thoughts, but it seems like everybody is judging him

kind of side by side with Trump, right? Like the contrast between Trump is this larger than life figure who's confrontational and loud and entertaining and insane. And then Mike Pence, who is kind of like the most quiet, boring, monotone person that might've made for a good balance for the ticket for Trump in 2016. But I think it's led voters to kind of dismiss him as a viable presidential candidate.

Yeah, I mean, I have like a smattering of theories surrounding Pence and also with Trump. I mean, one of them is Tim Miller kind of has this riff that I've always thought was really good about there was a fundamental misunderstanding around kind of secular white working class voters who have some religiosity where they might go to church or they might culturally say they're Christian, but they find that

Mike Pence's intensity towards his Christianity. And like, they find it kind of weird. And actually for lots of them, they too have gotten a divorce or they too have had a kid who maybe had a kid out of wedlock. I mean, like when I listened to Republican voters, the extent to which life touches them in all kinds of ways and which they have sort of much more joy,

general tolerance for personal foibles than one might have anticipated. And so I've always thought that whether it's because culturally things have changed or what have you, that Donald Trump's thrice married adultering ways actually seemed more normal to people than Mike Pence's very devout ways. Yeah.

Yeah, that's an interesting theory. I mean, I guess, though, I would have expected that at least in the focus group where you filtered for people who are, you know, professed evangelicals, and it did seem like this group had at least a handful of people who were pretty seriously devout, right? I mean, one of them worked at a church.

several seem to be pretty regular churchgoers. I thought that at least in that group, you might have some more positive sentiment. It wasn't there. I mean, I think the point is valid and it speaks to a lot of the research about what evangelical even means, you know, how people self-identify, right? A lot of people might identify as evangelical, but they don't go to church that often. They don't read the Bible. It's not actually like a major part of their lives. It might be as much a

political identifier as anything. But yeah, I think there is probably something to that, that Pence's particular brand, you know, his political persona is maybe a little alienating to people. I think there's also just like a more simple, you know, explanation, which is like, he doesn't have a lot of charisma, you know, like, he's just not a charismatic figure. And I think,

Like after four years, five years, whatever, however you want to count it of Donald Trump, like the bar for charisma is pretty high. You know, people want a lot of personality in their presidential candidates. Now, maybe less than Trump. That was another thing you heard in this group that like,

people were a little tired of Donald Trump constantly picking fights on Twitter and, you know, whatever else. And so maybe you could split the difference between those two. But Mike Pence just fundamentally being kind of a boring guy, I think also just probably hurts him with these people. Though, again, I just want to make the point, it is shocking that the very fact that he is kind of like, or at least

presents himself as an ideal, wholesome Christian dad and husband undercuts him, that that hurts him with these voters, just speaks to how much attitudes in the conservative evangelical world have changed over the last 20 years. Well, the thing I've never quite been able to get my head around with Mike Pence when I get all these calls from reporters that I know his team is out there ginning up is like Mike Pence's theory of the case. Like-

There's a smattering of different ways people talk about him. For some, it's like, you know, super nice guy. Totally would love him as a neighbor. Which always feels like a backhanded compliment. That's right. You know, seems like a really nice guy. He'd be a great neighbor, but no one would vote for him. But they're kind about him. They think he seems like a nice man. But then there's the other half that say he did not back up Trump. He betrayed him. He stabbed him in the back.

These are my always Trumpers typically. And even it bleeds into like another group where they're not so committed to the lie that the election was stolen, but they just have this sense that Mike Pence didn't really stay on side. He just didn't do the right thing for the team. Like if you need personal security to go to an event that would have the base of the party there, how do you

How do you think you win a nomination? Like, it's not that they don't like Mike Pence. It's that a chunk of the party wanted to murder Mike Pence. I mean, it is possible. You know, let's give the benefit of the doubt is that it is possible on January 6th. He wasn't making a calculation about his future political prospects. Oh, no, I agree with that. I know. I think he did the right thing to do the right thing. I'm just talking about the way voters vote.

interpret him. He gets points with me for this. I don't think he gets points with the voters. Yeah, no. But what I was going to say, though, is that he probably also did make a calculation around January 6th that Trump had lost re-election. Trump was on his way down if you're valuing him as a stock. It was sell time on Donald Trump. And maybe he thought that the voters were going to

follow his lead, that he rode the Trump wagon as far as it would take him. And then he jumped off. I don't really know what he's thinking now. I mean, when you look at

the landscape. I'm sure that his campaign or his team is like holding similar focus groups and encountering similar sentiments. And I mean, I genuinely, I was at one point listening to these voters. I was trying to put myself in the head of somebody who was trying to help Mike Pence get elected president. And I was like listening to these people and I was like,

What would I do to overcome this sentiment? Because the answer is really not obvious. It's not like, oh, I just need to define myself better or I need to like get on Fox News more often or I need to reach these voters. Like these voters have seen him for four years and they're not moved by him. And so I don't really know why he, how he thinks he wins a Republican primary in this climate.

Right. And there's another word besides boring that often comes up, which you heard in some of those clips, which is establishment, which is also one that they hit Nikki Haley with and a few others that are candidates that, again, are from the before times. The voters have a very strong sense of people who had profile in the before times.

And they have decided that those people mean going backwards. Yep. The way they talked about Nikki Haley was as a, you know, she seems like she's running for vice president. One of the voters, I think, said something about how, I don't know if I trust her on foreign policy and then kind of corrected herself and said, well, I guess, you know, she was in the U.N., but I don't know. I just don't think she has it.

And I think that there is this sense, like you said, that she is a product of some bygone era of Republican politics that nobody wants to return to. Right.

You heard the same thing when the moderator asked about a host of other candidates, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie. Like it was kind of just like a shrug. You know, one voter said the ship has sailed on them. Right. Yes. I think that Republican voters seem to be in a moment where if they don't want Donald Trump again, they want somebody newer and more excited. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of interest in mining past primary fields for future presidents.

Yeah. You know, we talked about this a little earlier, but I want to play it for people because I thought it was pretty interesting. And it's just a question I get a lot, which is how do evangelicals justify voting for Donald Trump? And you talked about that poll, which I also find that illustrative and staggering in its own right. But let's listen to how they answered the question about how they view character in the role of choosing their politicians.

I don't believe in what Donald Trump does in his personal life and different things, but I believe that he could do the things he was saying because of his professional background. So that's where it's hard is I don't know that I could just put all of my vote into a person because they had a good moral character if they don't have the experience. So that was, I think, the biggest thing for me with Trump.

Let's use pro-life and abortion. It's like that issue comes down to that moral choice, at least for me. And

You know, like with Donald Trump, yes, he was the best candidate when I voted. And what I saw in his four years was he did have a very strong pastor that was there with him a lot. And, you know, that pastor was here from Dallas, and I would hear him on the radio a lot talking about not necessarily their personal meetings, but just talked about how he's getting it.

And that's all we can ask. I mean, everybody's going to make mistakes and do the wrong thing at times, but it comes down to, you know, if it was a decision, there is a moral, I think, aspect to every decision, I think. I definitely take into account that.

some of their moral character, but for me, it's policies are going to be the primary way that I vote. Like I said previously, I think that Trump recognized that his base, the people that are going to vote for him, the right side of the political party are, um,

fundamentally a very Christian group, have a lot of faith, family oriented. And he played into that. It's smart. That's what you would want to do. So that's great. Do I think that he's like super moral family guy? Maybe not. But that doesn't matter to me as much as he's aligning with the politics of the right in their missions.

So there you have it. That's the shift in the mass rationalization. You said something earlier that I think relates to this about Mike Pence and his miscalculation about what being vice president was going to mean and how it was going to position him. And one of the things that he did, and this was totally in your piece about Pence, was sort of the central role that he played in creating a permission structure for evangelicals to support Trump in 2016. Yeah.

And now they've given themselves permission, not just for Trump, but like for it to not matter. That's such a good point, actually. I hadn't thought of it quite that way, but Pence was one of the kind of the most important figures in rewiring evangelical politics over the past 10 years, right? He basically created

created the permission structure. It worked. Evangelical voters decided they don't need to consider moral character in their presidential candidates. And now he's written himself out of Republican politics, right? Exactly. He convinced them all that the things that he brings to the table aren't actually that important. And he won the debate. And now his political career is probably over. That's right. It

People say that sometimes, by the way, like when you talk about him, they're like his political career is over. Like voters say that. It was funny that like that was one of the themes that I heard also in the discussion of Pence was they would talk about their own kind of like lack of interest in him. But they would also say he has no shot. They would turn into pundits and kind of had reached the decision like this guy doesn't have anything.

what it takes to win. And so I'm not going to waste a vote on it, right? One thing I did want to mention, though, you got it kind of in the clips you were just showing, is there was kind of an interesting split

in one aspect of the discussion of Trump, which is some of the voters in that group seemed genuinely to believe that Donald Trump was, if not like on their team, you know, spiritually, at least was like sort of starting to understand the importance of faith and moral values. Like a couple people talked about how patriarchy

pastors or religious leaders had gotten to know Trump and vouched for his character, right? Then there were others who were maybe more cynical about it and maybe more savvy and essentially said, look, he was pandering to us and I was fine with that because what matters is ultimately that he does what I want him to do and he did what I wanted him to do.

And so, like, I do think that's interesting because I think that there is a sense sometimes out there that evangelical voters have just been duped by Trump, that he's convinced them that he's like a man of God or, you know, spiritual or something. And the reality is, I don't think most evangelical voters think that.

It was helpful that Trump had this kind of evangelical advisory committee with people who have a lot of pull in certain segments of the conservative Christian world vouching for him. And so I thought that was interesting. Yeah, and I also thought that when she told the story about somebody coming to her church to say he was OK, it was such a testament to the way these permission structures work. And Mike Pence was just one big blanket permission structure.

for a lot of folks, but you're also right. Just the armchair pundits who are, yeah, well, I'm an important demographic in this voting block and he needed to tell me the things I needed to hear and fine.

I'm glad he did. And that's where actually he gets a lot of credit often from voters in terms of he did the things he said he was going to do. And one of the biggest places he gets it is on abortion. When we do just the two-time Trump voter groups, you do get a lot of secular folks for whom abortion is not important. And the groups are often mixed. You get a lot of people who are still

either pro-choice or pro-very moderate levels of choice. But in this group, this group was very pro-life. And I was interested in whether or not Dobbs would make abortion sort of less salient for this group, which is something people ask a lot now that we've had the decision is sort of, will it take the wind out of the sails of these voters for whom it was a major driver? Let's listen to what they said.

I do think it's still a threat because both sides now are working just as hard, you know, for what they believe. And yeah, I don't think that is going to change anything really.

It was a huge win. In fact, I remember in 16, and myself included, voted Republican partially because we knew Supreme Court justices might be appointed in that period. And it worked. But really, all that happened is it got pushed back to the states. It'd still be codified into law other ways. That was one big battle, but the war's not over. No, I just agree. I think it's definitely still an ongoing thing.

So still happening. Have you seen this in your reporting where, you know, there's not this sense from pro-life folks that, oh, it's all we've won or that they feel like the fight is very much sort of still ongoing? Yes. I have not seen any drop off in my conversations with conservative voters in terms of their interest in or passion about abortion as in the wedge issue. Part of me wonders if some of this is reflex, right? Like abortion and Roe have been

among the top talking points for so long in the conservative base that they've kind of forgotten how to not bring it up. But that wasn't really the case in this focus group. Like when they talked about it, they made the point, which I think is basically true that like pro-choice people are going to keep fighting, if not at the federal level, then the state.

State level, there's all kinds of legal and legislative and referendum battles that will be going on around abortion in the years to come. And so it doesn't seem like it has faded as an issue that they're driven by. Yeah, agree. And I think that's going to make a difference potentially in the Republican primary. I mean, I think that there's going to be some calculations going on, maybe most specifically by DeSantis, to try to figure out how he balances what

pro-life voters are going to want to hear and what they know about how badly it fared for them with sort of the general electorate in 2022. What do you think about that? That will be interesting to watch because, you know,

for so long, basically the promise that Republican presidential candidates at the national level made was that I will appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe. That was the most they had to promise. Now, some did go further. And I actually remember the first Republican primary debate in 2016, Marco Rubio going much further. And I don't want to mischaracterize what he said, so I'm not going to because I can't remember off the top of my head. But I think it was something like a federal abortion ban that he supported. And

But for the most part, Republican presidential candidates just didn't need to promise anything beyond, I'm going to appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices. Now, the terms of the debate have changed. And since a lot of the battles are going to be happening at the state level, I will be curious to see how somebody like Ron DeSantis, or even Donald Trump for that matter, will take sides on state level issues.

Also, will they, you know, support federal legislation codifying abortion bans, you know, after a certain number of weeks of pregnancy? Like there are a lot of places that this debate can go now that Republican presidential candidates didn't need to go in years past because Roe was the main wedge issue.

Yeah, that's a great point. So I just want to play one last piece of sound. You alluded to this earlier, but I would say the main place that I thought this group sounded somewhat different from a lot of the other two-time Trump voter groups was when we asked about immigration. Let's listen. Mm-hmm.

I'd say it's a dichotomy for me because you want people to do things the right way. But at the same time, as a Christian, you should be accepting of people that are in need. So I think there's definitely a balance there. I don't think I have that answer to that question. But you hate to turn people away that need help, but you also want them to go about it the correct way. So I don't know.

If I was in their position, I would absolutely be trying to get across the border. If you put yourself in their place, it's hard to not be empathetic for me personally. But would I try and, you know, go through a visa program or would I middle of the night go under a chain link fence? I don't know. It's easy for me to sit here in my house and say that I would do it the right way.

I think certainly many of them could prove at this point that their life is in danger where they are and come through the proper channels. I mean, they're not just sneaking over the southern border. So I would have to assume they are coming through some sort of channels to be able to get here. And so I'm all for helping them out when they get here. And I definitely understand wanting to escape both of those countries right now.

I'm okay with, you know, taking people in, especially, you know, like there's so much like human trafficking going on in these places and it has to be done right. So, I mean, people can't be like just sneaking in here. Ukrainians, they can come. Sure. What the heck?

What the heck? So this is a little delightful deviation from some of the other groups you hear. But, you know, as you noted before, and I think it's worth saying, like a lot of Ron DeSantis fans in this group. And oftentimes when I ask people what they like about Ron DeSantis, you'd be surprised or maybe you wouldn't. How often him putting the migrants on the plane comes up as a big plus, thumbs up from him. Do you think that his stance on immigration would hurt him with voters like this at all?

You know, I would love to say yes. I'm not sure it will. I mean, you know, it's possible. Like, I will point out that some of those clips were people who are making a distinction between taking in refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine versus undocumented immigrants from Mexico and South America. And I would imagine that some of the sentiment there

among evangelical conservative voters might be a little warmer toward war refugees from war-torn countries than Central and South American immigrants for probably a variety of reasons. That said, I guess I would like to see more research on this, but it did seem that

While attitudes on immigration might be different among people of faith in contrast to general Republican primary voters, it didn't seem to be a motivating factor in their votes in the 2016 primaries.

Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I did not sense that with some exceptions. I know, for example, Mormon voters were very down on Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries. And I did see some research that indicated that immigration was one of the reasons. So maybe it would. But I haven't seen a lot of evidence that it's the primary motivator for these voters. Yeah, I'm deeply skeptical.

I would say, you know, the gentleman in the clip used the word dichotomy. I think that these are voters who are very able to say on one hand, like they personally would take in refugees while being perfectly fine with a candidate who puts migrants on planes as a political stunt. Yeah.

McKay Coppins, great conversation. I so appreciate you joining us today on The Focus Group. It was wonderful to talk to you. And thanks to all of you for joining us for another episode of The Focus Group podcast. We will see you again next week. Be well. Take care. See ya. Thanks, Sarah.