Putting US First: How Outgroup Hostilities and Defense of the Status Quo Motivate White Evangelical Affect Toward Candidates in U.S. Elections 2004 to 2016

Abstract

How do voters construct feelings toward inparty elites? More specifically, how do they do so when they lack a shared policy agenda or shared salient social identity with candidates beyond partisan identification? In this paper, I investigate this puzzle by developing a theory of Putting America First to explain white evangelical affect toward Republican presidential candidates from 2004 to 2016. Using ANES surveys from 2004 to 2016, I test the effectiveness of this model of candidate affect. I find that shared outgroup hostility, what I call Putting Us First, motivates positive affect for presidential candidates among white evangelicals, regardless of shared policy objectives and descriptive representation. Overtime, white evangelicals’ affect is driven by outgroup hostilities rather than Culture Wars values. Overall, this informs our understanding of voter affect toward candidates and the increasingly important role of social outgroup hostility in defense of the status quo.

Keywords

electoral behavior candidate affect partisanship politics and religion political psychology

Introduction

In the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. election, journalists and scholars attempted to explain why so many white evangelical leaders endorsed Donald Trump and why so many polls showed record high white evangelical¹ support for the less than conventional Republican candidate. At the root of this puzzle was a question about how a social group defined by clear culturally traditional policy goals, high moral expectations of elected officials, and clear religious boundaries could support a thrice-married casino mogul, who bragged about groping women without their consent and who made several religious gaffes in the lead up to the election. Many explained that evangelicals were simply “holding their noses” and, when faced with two “immoral” candidates, were choosing the candidate who would advance their policy goals (Johnson, 2016). While such an explanation satisfied some, it fails to account for evangelicals’ consistently high feelings of warmth for Trump before the election and continuing into his term as president. If evangelicals did not like Trump, but merely wanted him to nominate conservative Supreme Court justices and fight for anti-LGBTQ+ policies, why would they express such consistently positive feelings toward Trump? The reason for this positive affect is their shared outgroup hostilities against groups threatening the status quo.

Since Ronald Reagan, white evangelicals have voted for Republican candidates, and yet their enthusiastic embrace of Trump, despite the fact that his personality, values, policy positions, and faith did not align or make any serious effort to align with evangelicals, remains a central question for scholars of American political behavior. The puzzle of white evangelical support for Trump, therefore, invites the question of how members of a politically-important social group construct feelings toward candidates when they lack either shared policy goals or shared social identity with the candidate. More specifically, recent literature in political science demonstrates that affective orientations are a key determinant of polarization in the electorate and among elected officials (Amira et al., 2021; Huddy et al., 2015; Iyengar et al., 2012; Iyengar & Westwood, 2014; Layman et al., 2006; Martherus et al., 2021; Mason, 2016, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; Mason & Wronski, 2018; Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018). The shift in focus on partisan affect has helped uncover the complex dynamics of affective assessments across partisan lines, but work remains to examine its role in intraparty contests. We have identified many of the crucial factors motivating affective assessments across party lines, but more work remains to identify and clarify which factors behind partisan identification construct affective assessments of inparty elites. The puzzle of white evangelical affect toward Donald Trump in 2016 provides an opportunity to investigate this question.

In this paper, I construct a three-pronged framework, Putting America First, to examine how white evangelicals assess Republican candidates from 2004 to 2016. Of these, it is Putting Us First, the branch that measures how white evangelicals’ outgroup hostilities drive positive assessments of Republican candidates, which is most important. This framework clarifies the central and enduring role of shared outgroup hostility (Putting Us First) in white evangelicals’ construction of affect toward Republican candidates, especially when the candidate does not share the group’s central policy agenda or salient social identity. Despite past focus on Culture Wars policy issues and signaling evangelical cultural values as the most important drivers of white evangelical political behavior, I find that white evangelical affect toward candidates is rooted primarily in shared outgroup hostilities, or “putting ‘us’ first,” in an effort to defend the status quo.

White evangelicals are a politically-important right-of-center group with clearly defined anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage policy goals and a clear salient social identity with political valence (Campbell et al., 2018; Margolis, 2018; Patrikios, 2008, 2013), who enjoy veto power over Republican nominations. In short, it is crucial that we understand the behavior and preferences of white evangelicals if we are to understand Republican Party politics.

Further, white evangelicalism’s theology of individualism and American exceptionalism and their high religiosity make them likely to defend the status quo. I expect that highly religious individuals in other white religious groups, white non-religious conservative groups, and non-white evangelicals should exhibit some of these same patterns at some times, partially because a sizable number of rural and working class Whites are evangelicals, for example. Trump used scapegoating of various outgroups to appeal to all sorts of predominantly white social groups, including white Catholics and white mainline Protestants. In the Supplemental Appendix, section G, I compare how Putting Us First applies across other groups of Whites and find that similar processes seem to predict affect toward Republican candidates, though the patterns are not consistent and large proportions of each group are made up of white evangelicals, who are likely contributing to the results I find.

Due to their unified and uniquely powerful influence, however, this study is limited to a study of white evangelicals. That the pattern explains attitudes in other groups does not undermine the importance of understanding the pattern among white evangelicals. White Christianity increasingly focuses on protecting white supremacy and defending its dominance in social and political spheres (Jones, 2020). While this characterizes white Christianity in general, white evangelicals’ relative conservatism, unique individualistic and America-centric theology, and high religiosity make white evangelicals particularly likely to defend the status quo. Importantly, white evangelicals also wield the political power within a major political party to transform Putting Us First orientations into electoral reality and policy action.

The paper proceeds as follows: In the next section, I review the puzzle of evangelical support for Donald Trump, before turning to constructing the Putting America First framework, which re-conceptualizes white evangelical electoral behavior through insights from system justification theory. Following this, I turn to my expectations, data and methods, and analysis of my models, identifying patterns of white evangelical support for Republican candidates from 2004 to 2016, before concluding with reflections on the implications of these findings for understanding white evangelical political behavior as well as the Republican mass coalition more generally.

The Puzzle

Given that white evangelicals strongly identify with the Republican Party (Patrikios, 2008, 2013) and that Trump was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, white evangelical vote choice is not particularly puzzling, though white evangelicals’ higher turnout for Trump in 2016 than for previous Republican presidents is. Lauding Donald Trump as “a modern day Cyrus,” evangelical leaders claimed that Trump was chosen by God and “lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught.”² This is odd praise for a candidate who was pro-choice for most of his life, a former Democrat who donated to Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign, opposed North Carolina’s controversial House Bill 2 (the “Transgender Bathroom Bill”), spoke often of his pro-LGBTQ rights views, fought publicly with the Bush family and other Republican elites, and made several religious gaffes. Such gaffes included saying he would never ask God for forgiveness; calling the biblical book of Second Corinthians “Two Corinthians,” thereby revealing an unfamiliarity with Christian Scripture; calling the communion wafers central to a major Christian religious sacrament that represent the body of Jesus Christ a “little cracker” ; and aligning himself with the progressive mainline Presbyterian Church, USA. Support for Trump among these white evangelical elites, however, reveals a larger pattern of white evangelical political behavior rooted in preserving the status quo.

White evangelicals are a major political force that have largely taken control of the Republican Party. Scholars most often identify white evangelicals as Culture Wars policy goals warriors (Hunter, 1991; Layman, 2001; Wilcox, 2000). But, evidence also suggests that evangelicals’ political behavior is rooted in outgroup hostility toward (“religious threat” by) secularists and those secularizing America (Campbell, 2006; Djupe & Calfano, 2012; Smith, 1998, 2003; Wilcox, 2000). Further, Hetherington and Weiler (2009) argue that evangelicals during the 1960s were driven by racial resentment, ethnocentrism, and outgroup hostility against racial-ethnic minorities. These motivations, however, are more generally evidence of defense of the status quo with its various racial-ethnic, social, religious, and economic hierarchies.

My central question asks how white evangelicals construct affective assessments of candidates when lacking a shared salient identity and/or central policy goals. In this paper, I focus on white evangelicals from 2004 to 2016,³ because white evangelicals have a dominant role in a major political party, the Republican Party. Further, in the period from 2004 to 2016, white evangelicals have had to construct affective assessments of four very different Republican candidates. The variety of these Republican candidates as they relate to white evangelical identity and political behavior offers an opportunity to untangle the most important features in explaining white evangelical affect toward candidates under several different conditions.

White evangelicals in the Christian Right have supported Republican candidates strongly since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (Layman, 2001). Before the 2016 election, however, white evangelical support for George W. Bush in 2004 represented the highwater mark for a Republican presidential candidate, when the Bush campaign focused on motivating white evangelicals to vote after a narrow “win” in 2000. In 2016, white evangelicals were particularly supportive of Donald Trump, despite Trump having several challengers for their support in the Republican primary.

Results from Pew’s American Trends Panel Survey from December 2015 to April 2016 found that Republican and Republican-leaning white evangelical respondents were at first skeptical of Trump, but that 42% supported his candidacy by April 2016 (Smith, 2016). Further, by July 2016, 94% of evangelical respondents to a Pew telephone poll indicated Trump support over Clinton, with 46% strongly supporting Trump, more than any other religious group polled. Later on in the general election, white evangelicals were among Trump’s most ardent supporters, but this support was strongest among less committed white evangelicals (Layman, 2016). Further analysis, however, finds that while white evangelicals mostly preferred candidates who aligned with their policy preferences and shared social identities (white evangelical candidates) in the primaries, they quickly became staunch Trump supporters in the general election—a pattern similar to the 2012 primary and general election (Margolis, 2019).

The strength of white evangelical identity also conditioned the patterns of white evangelical support in the 2004, 2012, and 2016 elections. In the 2004 election, it was low commitment white evangelicals⁴ whose massive support and turnout handed Bush victory after relatively low turnout in 2000 (Layman & Hussey, 2007). Low commitment (or “nominal”) white evangelicals supported Romney and Trump most fervently in the primaries (confirming the findings of Layman (2016)), but high commitment (or “traditionalist”) white evangelicals supported him most strongly in the general election (Margolis, 2019).

These findings exacerbate the puzzle further because high commitment/traditionalist white evangelicals should care the most about culturally traditional Culture Wars policies and their white evangelical social identity. In contexts of cross-pressuring, individuals are generally demotivated from voting at all, much less overcoming such cross-pressuring by being the most enthusiastic and consistent supporters of the candidate driving the cross-pressuring (Campbell, 2002; Mutz, 2006). But, not only did white evangelicals vote for Donald Trump despite the negative effects of cross-pressuring, they also held and continue to hold very positive feelings toward him, even seemingly altering their standards for elected officials for Trump.

In a June 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), just 30% of white evangelical respondents said 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,” the lowest percentage of any religious group surveyed (Jones & Cox, 2016). In a survey by the same group in October 2016, in the midst of the release of a video in which Trump brags about groping a woman without her consent, 72% of white evangelicals said that personally immoral acts do not affect elected officials’ public and professional behavior—incredibly, the highest tolerance among all religious groups surveyed. While all groups appear to have become more accepting of immoral behavior among elected officials, white evangelicals have shown the most dramatic shift. So, how is it that white evangelicals, a group typically characterized as preferring moral (white evangelical) candidates who represent cultural values policies, came to support a candidate like Donald Trump so strongly?

Looking at the four most recent Republican presidential candidates offers an opportunity to clarify the dynamics of how this right-of-center group constructs affect toward presidential candidates on the basis of shared policy goals, shared white evangelical identity, and shared outgroup hostilities. In 2004, George W. Bush represented a near ideal candidate for white evangelicals because he shared and promoted white evangelical culturally traditional policy goals and he was an evangelical insider.⁵ In 2008, John McCain lacked Bush’s insider status as an evangelical, as a mainline Protestant Christian, but his social identity did not conflict with or challenge white evangelicals. McCain also aligned perfectly with white evangelical policy preferences through his promotion (and voting in support) of anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage policies. Mitt Romney’s candidacy in 2012 presented a unique challenge for white evangelicals because he aligned with white evangelicals on his culturally conservative policy agenda, but his social identity as a Mormon not only made him an evangelical outsider, it also represented a challenge to evangelical identity (Campbell et al., 2012). Finally, Donald Trump represented a further challenge because he did not initially align with white evangelicals’ culturally traditional policy agenda⁶ and he represented a challenging outsider social identity as a non-evangelical who made multiple religious gaffes leading up to the election.

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in June of 2015, his rhetoric attracted a lot of attention and it has dominated airwaves ever since. Whether understood to be abrasive and threatening or honest and clear, Trump’s rhetoric is distinctive for a presidential candidate and it may hold clues to his success among white evangelicals. Utilizing “Make America Great Again” and “America First” as central campaign themes established a zero-sum view of the world in which America was a “dumping ground” for the world’s problems. Most importantly, it revealed that by putting “America First,” Donald Trump signaled to white evangelicals that he was the candidate best situated to retrieve the pre-Obama systems of “greatness,” not because he was an evangelical or held all of their policy attitudes, but because he knew which outgroups to blame.

Putting Us First

The Trump campaign’s combination of competitiveness with this zero-sum view of the world harkens back to the Culture War themes, but in more expansive terms. The war is no longer confined to religious freedom and cultural values, rather it has expanded to other spheres as well. The Trump campaign’s “America First” strategy, however, is what some political psychologists refer to as a “system justifying and recovering” framework (Azevedo et al., 2017; Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2004, 2007; Jost & Hunyady, 2002; Jost & van der Toorn, 2011). System justification theory identifies a psychological payoff for defending the status quo from threats to established hierarchies that define existing social, political, racial-ethnic, and economic systems. Sometimes this even causes individuals to defend systems that do not benefit the individual or their social ingroup(s) (Jost et al., 2003, 2007).

Most important for the current study is why evangelicals are motivated to justify the system and defend the status quo.⁷ First, white evangelical theology and practice indicate system justifying behavior would be particularly prevalent among evangelicals. White evangelical Protestantism is characterized by individual salvation and the need to have an individual conversion, “born-again,” experience as opposed to communal and global experience in which social connection is a central part of religious life. This individualistic theology places responsibility for one’s salvation in one’s own hands and envisions change occurring within individuals. Such an inwardly-focused theology justifies “the way things are” by strengthening the idea that someone’s life circumstances are a result of their own individual choices, not the result of the systems in which they operate. By shifting responsibility to individuals and inward change, an individualistic theology defends and affirms the status quo—it is people who need to make individual choices to be saved, not a society that needs to re-orient and update its systems.

Additionally, white evangelicals’ theology is uniquely America-centric. White evangelicals exhibit uniquely high levels of American nationalism and patriotism, compared to non-white evangelicals and to other white Christians and nonreligious Whites (Guth, 2019). White evangelicals’ patriotism views America and its role in the world through a religious lens in which America is God’s chosen nation, with a special role vis-à-vis Israel. This America-centric, nationalistic theology further enhances system-justifying orientations among white evangelicals by glorifying traditional American hierarchies. Combined with the more individualized theological orientation noted above, these forces make white evangelicals likely to exhibit system-justifying orientations. Further, evangelical elites almost exclusively endorse Republican and conservative political positions (Smidt, 2007; Wilcox & Robinson, 2007).

Second, white evangelical Protestants tend to be very religious. Religion provides adherents a means to cope with the arbitrariness and chaos of the world (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). Further, many conservative Christian theologies account for injustice and suffering in the world through explanations of divine action within the existing social order. These theologies justify the system by making it divinely-ordained, a pattern most clearly observed in prosperity gospel churches (Bowler, 2013).⁸ Empirical evidence supports this theoretical assumption, finding that religious individuals are higher in system justification than non-religious or less-religious individuals (Jost et al., 2014).

A concerning trend in American politics since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 is the growth of white identity and white anxiety (Jardina, 2019; Jones, 2016; Marsh & Ramírez, 2019; Mutz, 2018; Parker & Barreto, 2013; Ramírez, 2013). In response, scholars have identified the role of various social psychological predispositions in explaining whites’ support for Trump, including authoritarianism, social dominance, ethnocentrism, status threat, and white social identity (Choma & Hanoch, 2017; Crowson & Brandes, 2017; Jardina, 2019; MacWilliams, 2016; Mutz, 2018; Pettigrew, 2016, 2017). But, these frameworks fail to explain evangelicals’ consistent patterns of support for Republican candidates despite Trump’s supposed uniqueness. Using the lens of system justification, however, offers a means to comprehensively explain white evangelicals’ affective assessments of candidates from 2004 to 2016 beyond the Culture Wars policy agenda and descriptive representation.

Speaking specifically of white Christians, Jones (2016) roots whites’ anxieties in the real and perceived loss of power, especially as compared to the rise of non-white Christian and non-Christian organizations along with the subsequent decline of “White Christian America.” While the roots of this anxiety are not new, many recent events have provoked a more sudden and dramatic rise: the election of the first non-White president, ongoing demographic change, increased immigration, rapid globalization, the most racial-ethnic and gender diversity on the U.S. Supreme Court in history, and historic rights for LGBTQ+ individuals.⁹ Central to all of these events is that white Christians interpret them through the lens of loss in a zero-sum game. In group competition, especially competition between two parties in a two-party electoral system, the loss of power of one’s ingroups is connected with an increase in power among one’s outgroups, those weaker groups in historical hierarchies that threaten established hierarchies (Allport, 1954; Brewer, 1981, 1999, 2001; Brewer & Pierce, 2005; Jost & Banaji, 1994). This is especially the case among highly religious individuals (Jost et al., 2014). And so, white Christians interpret increased rights for some historically less powerful groups (LGBTQ+ individuals gaining protections against discrimination) as a loss of rights for currently more powerful groups (white Christians’ loss of rights to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals).

While the decline of white Christian America affects all white Christians, I expect these effects to be particularly acute for white evangelicals due to the important role individualism and American nationalism play in their theology. Because of this unique theological vision and white evangelicals’ on average higher levels of religiosity, white evangelicals should have enhanced system-justifying orientations, compared to white mainline Protestants and white Catholics. The decline of the system they justify (i.e., the decline of white Christian America), therefore, should affect white evangelicals more so than it should white Christians, on average. As a result, white evangelicals’ response to the decline of white Christian America should lead to a notable and measurable defense of the status quo as reflected in candidate support and selection.¹⁰

Considering white evangelical political behavior through this lens clarifies white evangelical support for Trump. Republican candidates since 2000 have generally had reputations as moral people, enjoyed near universal support from their party, and thoroughly attended to the cultural values policy concerns of white evangelicals that align with the system justifying strategy of putting traditional cultural values first. Trump’s campaign in 2016 and Romney’s in 2012 cross-pressured white evangelicals and present unique opportunities to identify system justifying tendencies of white evangelicals that may previously have been hidden by cultural values alignment between candidates and white evangelical voters. In 2012 and 2016, then, additional system justifying attitudes that are not a part of Culture Wars policy goals should become clearer and even more predictive of Republican candidate affect.

These attitudes are just those found in the Trump campaign’s rhetoric: anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-minority sentiment. These antipathies have both racial-ethnic and economic valence and fit into the system justifying Putting Us First orientation I construct, as they present threats to existing racial-ethnic, social, political, and economic hierarchies. This is a part of a three-pronged Putting American First agenda that Republicans, especially Trump, have used to appeal to white Christian, white working class, and other predominantly white social groups. In this paper, however, it is these threats to the status quo that indicate it is Putting Us First, characterized by outgroup hostility, that most clearly explains white evangelical affect toward Republican candidates.

Putting America First is thus a means of outlining three fronts of the new cultural and political war: putting traditional cultural values first to combat the rise of liberal progressives threatening religious freedoms (Putting Tradition First), putting America’s borders first to prevent cultural, racial-ethnic, and economic change brought about by immigrants and globalization (Putting Borders First), and, increasingly important, putting evangelical in-group identifiers first by expressing hostility toward racial-ethnic minorities, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ individuals (Putting Us First). It is the last of these, Putting Us First, which is the most interesting in this study as it is the branch that best identifies the system justifying tendencies manifested as outgroup hostility among white evangelicals.

Putting “America First” assumes that America is under attack and losing. Because change is the indicator of this loss, this theme venerates the status quo and old hierarchies that built a “greater” America. “America First” rhetoric identifies threats to the status quo and stokes anger and fear against those who threaten to alter or have already altered it: liberal-progressives, racial-ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and globalists. These themes echo an American chauvinistic nationalism that sees the system, internationally and domestically, in terms of threats to America in many different spheres (Azevedo et al., 2017). My Putting America First framework identifies white evangelicals’ affective assessments across time in order to explain how candidates utilize shared outgroup hostilities as an electoral tool to motivate voters to overcome cross-pressuring in the context of unaligned policy objectives and non-descriptive representation.

Expectations

Putting Tradition First is the system justifying/recovering branch that prioritizes preserving Culture Wars policy goals regarding abortion, gay marriage, and gay rights. Fitting white evangelicals’ Culture Wars values into a larger framework establishes particular traditional values as normative and truly “American.” When candidates share Culture Wars policy goals with white evangelicals, this branch should predict more positive affect toward the candidate, and when there is a policy mismatch, there should be no relationship, leading to the first two hypotheses:

$H_{1 a}$ : Putting Tradition First is more likely to predict warm feelings toward Bush, McCain, and Romney than it is for Trump.

$H_{1 b}$ : In across time comparisons, Putting Tradition First will predict more warmth for Bush than for Trump.

Putting Borders First prioritizes anti-immigrant and anti-globalism sentiments. Prioritizing this branch means believing that existing borders, racial-ethnic composition, economic structures, and dedication to protecting America first preserve America’s power in the world. This should be the most important predictor of support for Trump in 2016, but should not be as predictive in previous years, when anti-immigrant, anti-globalist messaging was not a prominent feature of Republican campaigns, except for Romney in 2012:

$H_{2 a}$ : Putting Borders First is more likely to predict warm feelings for Trump and Romney, than it is for Bush and McCain.

$H_{2 b}$ : In across time comparisons, Putting Borders First will be more predictive of warmer feelings for Trump and Romney than for Bush. It is less likely to predict differences between affect toward McCain and Bush.

Finally, and most important for the present study, Putting Us First prioritizes hostilities toward white evangelical outgroups that threaten the status quo, including racial-ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, feminists, and Muslims. In line with Mason’s (2018a, 2018c) work on social identity alignment, these groups are all Republican party outgroups. These views affirm that existing racial-ethnic and social hierarchies are important for maintaining America’s station in the world and primes themes of racial threat from the Obama presidency.¹¹ This should be most important when candidates lack a shared social identity because they cannot develop positive affect toward themselves among evangelicals by priming ingroup identity and values and so prime outgroup hostilities, leading to the final two hypotheses:

$H_{3 a}$ : Putting Us First is likely to predict warm feelings for Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump, but most likely to predict this warmth for McCain, Romney, and Trump, when candidates lacked shared social identity with white evangelicals.

$H_{3 b}$ : In across time comparisons, Putting Us First is more likely to predict warm feelings for the McCain, Romney, and Trump than for Bush, because of challenges to white evangelical identity in Romney and Trump and outsider status in McCain.

Data and Measurement

To test the association between Putting Us First (and the other two branches of the Putting America First framework) and candidate affect, I utilize the American National Election Study presidential election time series surveys (ANES) from 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. I limit my analysis to self-identified white evangelical Protestants.¹² There are 166 white evangelical respondents in 2004, 314 in 2008, 628 in 2012, and 456 in 2016. I determine white evangelicals using self-identifying responses to questions about racial-ethnic identity and using the religious identification scheme by denominational affiliation developed by Steensland et al. (2000). While other strategies for identifying evangelicals exist, I utilize this one because it is widely used and is the most consistently measured and easily applied across this time span in which the religious identity questions asked on the ANES changed year to year, but the denominational affiliations questions did not. I limit my analysis to 2004 to 2016 because of data limitations, as relevant questions are not consistently asked going back to 2000 or before. My interest lies in measuring variation in white evangelical affect toward Republican candidates.

My dependent variable is affect toward the Republican presidential candidate in each year, scaled 0 to 1 and standardized at the individual level, according to the strategy identified by Knight (1984) and Wilcox et al. (1989). This individual-level standardization of feeling thermometer measures accounts for individual variation in how respondents answer feeling thermometer questions. I seek to explain the variation in affect toward the Republican candidate. Because white evangelicals are a (maybe the) key ingroup of the Republican Party, there may be concerns about the variability of this dependent variable among this subpopulation. Please see section A.1 in the Supplemental Appendix for a comparison of the variability of this variable compared to other subpopulations and the full ANES sample 2004 to 2016. I demonstrate that there is sufficient variation in the DV to warrant this investigation.

My key independent variable of interest are my measures of Putting Us First, though the other two measures of Putting America First are also important. From the theory developed above, I create additive indices of Putting Tradition First, Putting Borders First, and Putting Us First using exploratory factor analysis.¹³ The first factor, Putting Tradition First, includes measures of opposition to anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws, opposition to same sex marriage, opposition to abortion, and affect toward Christian Fundamentalists. Second, Putting Borders First includes views that immigrants take jobs from native-born American citizens, attitudes that America should admit fewer immigrants than it currently does, and favoring fewer imports from foreign countries. Third, Putting Us First is a combination of hostilities toward important evangelical outgroups: gays and lesbians, feminists, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims (Ahler, 2014, 2018; Ahler & Sood, 2018; Campbell et al., 2018; Huddy, 2001; Margolis, 2018; Mason, 2016, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; Mason & Wronski, 2018). Each of these measures is an additive scale rescaled to be 0 to 1 for comparability of regression coefficients.

For all feeling thermometers used to measure affect and hostilities (an inverted thermometer), I measure group affect by taking the difference between individuals’ thermometer rating of particular groups and their mean rating of all groups asked about in the survey (Knight, 1984; Wilcox et al., 1989). For more details on the factor analysis results and fit statistics, see Supplemental Appendix section C.

To assess the explanatory power of the Putting America First model, I include three alternative hypotheses for explaining support for the Republican candidate: anti-egalitarianism, authoritarianism, and economic anxiety (negative prospective view of the U.S. economy). I also include controls for party identification, ideology, income, church attendance, education, age, and view of the bible. These controls count for some other alternative hypotheses explaining white evangelical support for Republican candidates (party identification, ideology) as well as measures of religious believing and behaving (view of the bible and church attendance) that are crucial to disentangling differences in evangelical support among low and high commitment evangelicals. See Supplemental Appendix, section A.2 for further details on independent variables and controls.¹⁴

In all of my models, I model the variation in affect for Republican presidential candidates among white evangelicals. The first model is a simple ordinary least squares regression for each year, predicting affect toward Republican candidates within each year. The second model pools data from 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 and includes interactions for each year, testing the changing effect of each variable across the time period from 2004 to 2016 for all white evangelicals and for low and high commitment white evangelicals. Diagnostic tests demonstrate no issues with multicollinearity, please see Supplemental Appendix, section B for confirmation of this.

The interactions in the pooled model are with the year as a dichotomous variable rather than a continuous time variable, and as such explain whether the effect in a particular year is different than that variable’s effect in 2004. In the Supplemental Appendix, section F, I report the results of joint F-tests of the interactions to measure overtime changes in the second model, investigating the overall change in the effect across time. I include tables of the full model in the Supplemental Appendix, section H. To further test the robustness of these results, I model these effects in a series of random coefficients multilevel models.

Results

Before examining the results from the individual year and overtime analysis, I want to note the substantive interpretation of the results as they relate to the dependent variable of affect toward the Republican candidates Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump. I focus on candidate affect instead of vote choice because I am interested in intraparty differences. That being said, candidate affect and vote choice are certainly related. According to the Michigan Model of vote choice, candidate assessments, issue preferences, and party identification all contribute to vote choice with partisan identification having a direct effect on vote choice as well as an indirect effect through candidate assessments and issue preferences (Campbell et al., 1960; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008). And so, candidate affect does have important implications for vote choice in both primary and general contests. In the absence of time-series, cross-sectional primary elections data to test my hypotheses examining intraparty dynamics for white evangelicals, I examine the patterns of Putting America First among white evangelicals in general elections and model candidate affect. While candidate affect does not necessarily change vote choice in a general election, it can provide us with useful insights into which factors matter most as voters assess candidates to support in the primaries and make decisions about donations, volunteering, etc. in the general election campaign.

In the sections below, I examine the results of my analysis in greater detail. I report more extensively on the results of the analysis across all three branches in the Supplemental Appendix, section E. Below, however, I will focus primarily on detailing the most interesting findings, related to Putting Us First. But, first, a summary of the most important findings:

Putting Us First predicts more positive affect toward McCain, Romney, and Trump.

It is consistently outgroup antipathy through Putting Us First and not traditional values policy goals through Putting Tradition First that explains increased warmth toward Republican presidential candidates.

Overtime analysis confirms an increasing importance of Putting Us First in explaining warmth toward Republican presidential candidates from Bush to Trump. This growth is greater than changes in Putting Borders First, and there is no change in the explanatory power of Putting Tradition First overtime.

Individual Year Analysis

In Figure 1,¹⁵ I present the coefficient estimates with 95% confidence intervals testing the within-year effects of Putting America First. Figure 2 plots the same, but dividing the white evangelical sample into high and low religious commitment white evangelicals. I include the religious commitment models because of previous research finding variation among evangelical political behavior conditional on church attendance (Layman, 2016; Layman & Hussey, 2007; Margolis, 2019).

Figure 1.

Predicting Affect toward Republican Presidential Candidates among White Evangelicals, 2004 to 2016.

Figure 2.

Predicting White Evangelical Affect toward Republican Presidential Candidates by Level of Religious Commitment, 2004 to 2016.

I report coefficient estimates with 95% confidence intervals for the Putting America First framework only. I include tables of the full results in Supplemental Appendix, section E. Overall, I find that the performance of the Putting America First framework varies by year, with it predicting white evangelical affect for Republican candidates particularly well in 2012 and 2016. Putting America First more consistently predicts affect toward the Republican candidate than do any of the alternative hypotheses. Tables 10 to 20 (in the Supplemental Appendix) display the results, which indicate that, in the time period of interest, the alternative hypotheses do not perform very well.

The results in Figure 1 partially confirm $H_{1 a}$ , $H_{2 a}$ , and $H_{3 a}$ as I find that the most consistent and powerful predictor of positive affect toward Republican candidates is Putting Us First, which predicts more positive affect toward McCain, Romney, and Trump, but not for Bush. Putting Tradition First inconsistently predicts positive affect for candidates and while Putting Borders First increasingly predicts positive affect toward Republican candidates, its association is much weaker than that of Putting Us First. See Supplemental Appendix, section E for more detailed explanation of results of these branches. Together, these results provide fairly strong evidence for my Putting America First theory of white evangelical candidate affect, primarily that shared outgroup hostility through Putting Us First is a consistent and increasingly important predictor of white evangelical affect toward candidates.

To investigate the role of religious commitment (measured by regular church attendance), I run the same models (minus the church attendance control) among high and low religious commitment white evangelicals. Figure 2 plots the coefficient estimates of interest for high and low religious commitment white evangelicals. I observe few differences between these two subgroups of white evangelicals concerning Putting Tradition First and Putting Borders First (see Supplemental Appendix, section E for a more complete discussion of these two variables). Putting Us First has no association with candidate affect among low commitment white evangelicals, aside from a positive association with affect toward Trump. Among high commitment white evangelicals, however, Putting Us First predicts more positive affect toward McCain and Trump, but not toward Bush and Romney. This is largely due to the fact that the standard errors are larger for low religious commitment white evangelicals, which represent a smaller group in the general population and in this sample. These results provide some evidence that the power of Putting Us First in predicting white evangelical positive affect toward Republican candidates may be driven by high religious commitment. But, low commitment white evangelicals demonstrate similar patterns of positive affect for Republican candidates when they are higher in Putting Us First, the errors bars just barely miss statistical significance. And so, it is difficult to make any conclusions about significant substantive differences between high and low religious commitment white evangelicals. Instead, all white evangelicals are more or less similarly driven by outgroup hostility.

In short, I find evidence that hostility toward social outgroups for white evangelicals is associated with more positive affect toward McCain, Romney, and Trump, but the relationship is notably strong in 2008 and 2016, with coefficient estimates much larger for Putting Us First than for Party Identification, and with very small standard errors. In 2008 and 2016, then, these outgroup hostilities are more strongly associated with warm feelings toward McCain and Trump than is Party Identification. The results of the association between Putting Us First and affect toward the Republican candidate indicates that social identity-driven outgroup hostility has been a major predictor of feelings toward Republican candidates among evangelicals since 2008 and that Culture Wars issues (Putting Tradition First) have not been reliable predictors of candidate assessment since at least 2004.

These results provide strong evidence that there is a meaningful association between Putting Us First and white evangelical affect toward the Republican candidate. Even when candidates have been more openly religious in ways that align with evangelicals’ Putting Tradition First policy goals, this branch matters little in explaining evangelicals’ warm feelings toward the candidate. Most importantly for understanding evangelical political behavior more broadly, is the predictive power of Putting Us First in warmth toward McCain, Romney, and Trump. These results indicate that for each of these candidates, outgroup hostility against racial-ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, feminists, and Muslims is highly associated with positive affect toward the Republican candidate. And so, while Trump was particularly blatant about his hostility toward racial-ethnic minorities, white evangelicals’ hostilities toward these outgroups has informed their feelings toward previous Republican candidates as well, when the candidate is not an evangelical.

Overtime Analysis

The second and third models pool the datasets from 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 in order to investigate the overtime change in the relationships between particular independent variables and support for Republican presidential candidates through interaction effects. There is debate in the field about how much the group “evangelical” has changed over time, and thus it is unclear what comparisons of this group overtime may really capture. Even still, in using the RELTRAD measure to identify evangelicals in each year, I capture a sufficiently similar group from 2004 to 2016 to make appropriate overtime comparisons. Even as this group has changed over time, it is important to map how Whites who attend and identify with particular denominations in 2004 to 2016 are changing in response to various political circumstances. And so, because I have defined the group above as such, and identified white evangelicals with a consistent and well-respected measure, this overtime analysis accurately captures a sufficiently similar group of white evangelicals.

In Table 1, I report the coefficient estimates and standard error estimates for the interactions of each of the alternative hypotheses and the three branches of the Putting America First framework with the year variable (with 2004 as the comparison year). Please find regression tables of the full models in Tables 28 to 30 in section H of the Supplemental Appendix, which contain the results for low and high commitment white evangelicals and for all white evangelicals.¹⁶

Table 1.

Interaction Terms of the Pooled Model, White Evangelicals.

	McCain to Bush		Romney to Bush		Trump to Bush
	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE
Anti-Egalitarianism	−0.18*	0.07	−0.00	0.06	−0.01	0.06
Authoritarianism	−0.00	0.07	−0.03	0.05	0.02	0.05
Economic anxiety	0.05	0.06	0.14*	0.05	0.06	0.05
Tradition first	−0.16*	0.07	−0.02	0.06	−0.07	0.06
Borders first	0.09	0.06	0.13*	0.05	0.22*	0.05
Us first	0.25	0.14	0.03	0.11	0.36*	0.06

p < 0.05.

The interaction coefficients from the pooled model indicate statistically significant changes in the relationship between Putting Tradition First in 2008, which is because of a negative coefficient in 2008 compared with a positive one in 2004, see Table 30 in the Supplemental Appendix for details. There is a statistically significant difference between the association between Putting Borders First and affect toward Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Most importantly, I find a statistically significant interaction coefficient for the association between Putting Us First and affect toward Trump in 2016 compared to Bush in 2004. Statistically significant interaction coefficients in this pooled model indicate that the effect of this variable is different that that variable’s effect in 2004. These findings demonstrate, therefore, that with Putting Tradition First’s waning association with positive affect toward Republican candidates, outgroup hostility’s association is increasing compared to its effect in 2004.

To confirm the robustness of these results, I also analyze the results from a random coefficients multilevel model comparing the pooled models among all white evangelicals. In using this modeling approach, I can allow intercepts and coefficients to vary for the Putting America First variables by year and compare them across subgroups of interest. These models help me confirm the results of the interactions model above and the Joint F-tests in the Supplemental Appendix.

Figure 3 illustrates white evangelicals’ change in affect for candidates as predicted by Putting Us First. Since 2004, affect toward every Republican candidate is more strongly associated with a higher Putting Us First level for white evangelicals. Discussion of Putting Tradition First and Putting Borders First is in the Supplemental Appendix, section E. In short, I find that Putting Tradition First has no statistically nor substantively significant changes in association overtime while Putting Borders First has a stronger association with more positive affect toward Trump than previous candidates, but it is not a substantively meaningful shift. Outgroup hostility through Putting Us First is increasingly more important in predicting white evangelicals’ affect toward Republican candidates from 2004 to 2016.

Figure 3.

Expected Affect toward Republican Candidates among White Evangelicals by Level of Tradition First, Borders First, and Us First, conditioned on Candidate from Random Coefficients Multilevel Models.

Altogether, I do not find sufficient evidence in favor of $H_{1 b}$ , but do find strong evidence in support of $H_{2 b}$ and $H_{3 b}$ . Putting Us First is strongly associated with more positive affect toward Trump in 2016 than for Bush in 2004 and Romney in 2012, but not for McCain in 2008. These results confirm that this branch of the Putting America First framework is increasingly important in understanding the construction of white evangelical affect toward candidates.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to explain how white evangelicals constructs affective assessments of candidates. To do so, I constructed the Putting America First framework and tested its ability to explain white evangelical political behavior across time and conditional on religious commitment. In developing this framework, I construct three branches that explain the three major determinants of white evangelical candidate choice rooted in policy objectives and shared evangelical social identity/descriptive representation: Putting Tradition First, Putting Borders First, and Putting Us First. Of these, Putting Us First is the branch I consider to be more important for understanding white evangelical candidate assessments.

Using both within- and across-year analysis of white evangelical affect toward Republican presidential candidates from 2004 to 2016, I find that evangelical political behavior is not simply reducible to their commitment to religious traditionalism, nor are white evangelicals simply selecting white evangelical candidates. Instead, I find that a desire to put “America” first by preferring candidates who share white evangelicals’ outgroup hostilities (Putting Us First). While partisan identification with the Republican party drives evangelical vote choice to a large degree, I find evidence that white evangelical outgroup hostilities determine evangelical affect toward Republican candidates to a large degree.

As white evangelicals continue to be a crucial voting block and as they increasingly dictate Republican party imperatives (Wong, 2018, 2019), it is crucial to understand the central features of evangelical political behavior beyond Culture Wars issues. In constructing and testing the Putting America First framework of evangelical political behavior, I first clarify white evangelical support for Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries and general election as being rooted in outgroup hostilities and anti-immigrant and anti-globalist sentiments more than Culture Wars Issues. But further, I demonstrate how evangelical assessments of candidates shift between the branches of the model, depending on the candidate and the policies and issues they prioritize from 2004 to 2016. In particular, I find evidence that outgroup hostilities have long explained evangelical assessments of candidates, even if 2016 represents a particularly strong (and highly publicized) role for them.

In a time of increasing partisan polarization, it is important to investigate how politically-important groups within parties exhibit changing and consistent political behavior. As evangelicals continue to be the largest and most active ingroup within the Republican party, I focus my analysis on them here, but the results explain larger patterns within partisan politics. Most importantly, I find that constitutive groups increasingly assess candidates based on shared outgroup hostility rather than on shared policy objectives or descriptive representation. Future work should test to what extent these trends develop among other social groups to identify whether this represents a new manifestation of negative partisanship (Abramowitz & Webster, 2016, 2018; Margolis, 2019; Webster, 2018; Webster & Abramowitz, 2017). My findings also point to new avenues of research into testing political communication strategies of presidential candidates when they lack shared policy goals and/or a salient social identity with important groups within their party coalition. In particular, future work should investigate whether or not candidates intentionally express shared outgroup hostility toward social groups beyond partisan identity in these situations.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-apr-10.1177_1532673X211021852 – Supplemental material for Putting US First: How Outgroup Hostilities and Defense of the Status Quo Motivate White Evangelical Affect Toward Candidates in U.S. Elections 2004 to 2016

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-apr-10.1177_1532673X211021852 for Putting US First: How Outgroup Hostilities and Defense of the Status Quo Motivate White Evangelical Affect Toward Candidates in U.S. Elections 2004 to 2016 by Wayde Z.C. Marsh in American Politics Research

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Wayde Z.C. Marsh

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biography

Wayde Z.C. Marsh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include American electoral and voting behavior, political parties, public opinion, religion and politics, and racial and ethnic politics.

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