White evangelicals who voted on Tuesday stood by the Republican Party at the same rate they have for two decades. The problem for the GOP is how few of them voted. According to exit polls, white evangelicals made up just 17% of the 2026 electorate, a collapse from the 23% to 28% they provided in every national election since 2004. The pro-Israel Christian base that powered Donald Trump’s 2024 victory sat out the midterms, and Democrats swept both the House and the Senate.
The numbers were first crunched by Joshua Arnold of The Washington Stand, the news outlet of the Family Research Council, and later republished by Prophecy News Watch. Arnold found that 82% of voters who self-identified as “white evangelical or born-again Christian” voted Republican, identical to 2024. Multiplying total votes by the evangelical share of the electorate, he estimated that 44.4 million evangelicals voted in 2020 and 35.5 million in 2024. In 2026, that number fell to 21.0 million.
“From 2020 to 2026, the number of evangelicals who voted fell by half!” Arnold wrote. “The national vote followed no such trend.”
Total turnout rose. According to the University of Florida’s election lab, 123.5 million votes were cast, more than in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. Every other group showed up. Evangelicals stayed home.
“Where Was the Salt and Light?”
Evangelical leaders reacted with alarm. Worship leader and activist Sean Feucht wrote on X the morning after the election, “THE CHURCH STAYED HOME! White evangelicals dropped from nearly 25% of voters in 2024 to just 17% last night!”
“Where was the SALT AND LIGHT?!” Feucht added. “We cannot keep surrendering our influence through apathy and then complain about the darkness overtaking our nation! WAKE UP, CHURCH! We have so much work to do in America.”
Evangelist Franklin Graham framed the results as a spiritual turning point. “The midterms are now over, leaving some very concerned—while others are elated. We see our country inching closer toward socialism, which is historically an enemy of God and His Word,” Graham wrote. “However, today I am reminded that even though change is coming, as followers of Jesus Christ our job hasn’t changed. We are to live for Him in obedience to His Word, shine His light and truth in the ever-darkening world around us, and make disciples.”
The warnings came well before Election Day. In October, CNN reported that conservative leaders were sounding the alarm over weak evangelical mobilization. “I am not aware of any party machine that is at work right now to turn out evangelical voters,” one Texas pastor told the network anonymously. “Maybe they are assuming they are going to show up, but that is a dangerous assumption.”
Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas told The Daily Wire in mid-October that he had never seen his flock so torn. “To be honest, I’m seeing more concern this time around than I have in any other recent election,” Jeffress said. “Conservative Christians are troubled by Ken Paxton’s past, and I think they’re weighing right now whether they’re going to vote for the lesser of two evils or just stay at home.” Paxton lost the Texas Senate race to Democrat James Talarico, the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988.
Souring on Trump
The turnout collapse followed nearly two years of eroding evangelical enthusiasm for the president. Pew Research found that Trump’s approval among white evangelicals stood at 78% at the start of his second term. By January 2026, it had fallen to 69%, and the share of white evangelicals who were extremely or very confident that Trump acts ethically dropped from 55% to 40%. By October, his approval among white evangelicals was at 58%.
The Iran war deepened the slide. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in June found that 54% of evangelicals said Trump’s use of the military in Iran was not in line with their understanding of Christianity. Rising gas prices followed.
Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the movement’s most powerful turnout operation, conceded the damage before the vote. “Man does not live by bread alone, but man needs bread to live,” Reed told CNN. “So whenever you’re dealing with issues of inflation, and, in this case, we believe very strongly, temporarily higher gas prices than we would like to see, and that the president would like to see, that impacts people in their daily lives, and sure, it has an impact.”
Rep. Mark Harris (R-NC), a former pastor, made the same point. “Evangelicals have to put gas in their cars just like everybody else. They gotta buy groceries just like everyone,” Harris said.
Daniel Darling, director of The Land Center for Cultural Engagement, listed the causes of the GOP losses as “historic patterns,” “overreach by ICE and on tariffs,” “bad candidates who alienated key constituencies,” “muddled messaging on the war,” and “distractions.” His verdict was blunt. “Americans punish overreach,” Darling wrote. “They did it to Biden. Now they did it to Trump.”
Arnold points to a deeper wound: abortion. He argues that after the Dobbs decision in 2022, Republican leaders “fled from the pro-life victory and apparently resolved to do nothing further about it,” and that the 2024 party platform stripped out strong pro-life language. “Congress was doing nothing to restrict abortion; the Trump administration was doing nothing to restrict abortion,” Arnold wrote. “And evangelicals felt as if they were simply expected to fall in line and vote for Republicans anyway.”
Trump, for his part, accepted no blame. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted on Truth Social.
Vance Blames Israel
Vice President JD Vance offered a different explanation, one that alarmed supporters of the Jewish state. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote the day after the election. He said the top reasons Trump voters defected were to “end the war, focus on cost of living/inflation, put America first and change our relationship to Israel.” Donald Trump Jr. reposted the statement with the comment “Every word of this is 100 100 100.”
The data contradicts Vance. The AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters, found that only about one-third of voters called the Iran war “crucial” to their vote, compared with roughly half who said the same of the cost of living or government corruption. The voters who abandoned the GOP in the largest numbers were evangelicals, the most pro-Israel constituency in American politics. Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martino challenged Vance directly: “Nothing on tariffs? Nothing on deportations? Nothing on corruption? Really?”
The shift arrives as Trump has announced the end of US military aid to Israel. “By the end of this year, we won’t be paying Israel,” the president said on Election Day. “Israel is a very thriving country. They don’t need it.”
Jewish Voters Back El-Sayed
While the Christian Zionist base stayed home, American Jews turned out for the Democrats, including candidates openly hostile to Israel. An SSRS exit poll for the major networks found that 67% of Jewish voters backed Democrats nationally. A J Street poll put the figure at 72%.
In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate race. The Republican Jewish Coalition had labeled him “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America.” During the primary, El-Sayed called Israel “bloodthirsty” on national television. In his campaign, he declared, “They try to call you ‘hateful’ if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers.”
A survey of Jewish early voters commissioned by the Jewish Majority, a group founded to oppose anti-Zionism in politics, found that 57% voted for El-Sayed. That figure trailed the 79% of Jewish voters who backed Democrat Jocelyn Benson for governor on the same ballot. Among Jewish Democrats who refused to vote for El-Sayed, 92% cited antisemitism and his positions on Israel. “Jewish voters want to remain part of the big Democratic tent, but they expect their concerns about rising antisemitism, Israel and the treatment of their community to be taken seriously,” the group said.
One Michigan Democrat, Stacy, told Fox News before the vote, “Abdul El-Sayed has been campaigning by putting a target on all Jews’ backs.” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who is Jewish, campaigned alongside him, insisting, “There’s no such thing as the Jewish voters, just like there’s no such thing as the Muslim voters or the Black voters.”
The pattern was set a year earlier in New York City. In November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who supports the BDS movement and pledged to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, won 33% of the Jewish vote in the mayoral race, according to the SSRS exit poll. Evangelical commentator J.D. Hall noted at the time that Mamdani “got roughly TEN TIMES more Jewish votes than the Republican mayoral candidate.”
JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin offered an explanation in a column titled “Why do American Jews vote for antisemites like El-Sayed?” For many American Jews, Tobin argued, politics now fills the role religion once played, and their faith has become liberalism and the Democratic Party, with Jewish peoplehood and Israel discarded.
The Price of Silence
The two trends point in the same direction. The Christians who love Israel stayed home, and many Jews voted for candidates who oppose the Jewish state. That raises a question with roots in the Bible: what happens when the people placed in position to protect Israel choose silence?
The answer comes from the Book of Esther. When Haman’s decree threatened the Jews of Persia, Esther hesitated to approach the king. Mordechai sent her a warning that has echoed through every generation since:
“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)
The Hebrew reads im hacharesh tacharishi, a doubled verb that intensifies the meaning: if you are utterly silent. Mordechai held no doubt that the Jewish people would survive. God’s promise to Israel stands with or without any individual’s help. His warning was directed at Esther herself. Silence carries a price, and the one who stays silent pays it.
The lesson applies to both groups. Evangelicals hold real influence in the most powerful nation on earth, and their support for Israel has made them an anchor of American policy toward the Jewish state. Their absence on Tuesday handed Congress to a party whose rising stars call Israel “bloodthirsty.”
The Jewish voters who backed El-Sayed face a different warning from the prophet Isaiah. Consoling Zion, Isaiah declared, mehar’sayich u’machrivayich mimech yetze’u (Isaiah 49:17). In its plain meaning, the verse promises that Israel’s destroyers will depart from her. Jewish teaching has long read the words a second way: “your destroyers and those who lay you waste come out of you.” The gravest threats to the Jewish people have often come from within.
The deliverance Mordechai promised will come, as the Bible guarantees. Yeshuah, salvation, will arise from another place. The 2026 midterms will be remembered as the year the people placed in position for such a time as this decided to sit it out.
Arnold closed his analysis with a warning to politicians: “Parties cannot take votes for granted; they must continue to earn them.” Mordechai’s warning to Esther goes further. The responsibility rests with the voter, and the opportunity, once missed, may not return.
