In Seattle it has been axiomatic that white evangelicals tipped the scales in favor of Trump's electoral victory in 2016. For various reasons it has since been popular to hold that one group as symbolically responsible for Trump's win and books have come out describing how and why evangelicalism but specifically white conservative evangelicalism (as distinct from black or Latino or Asian evangelicalism, which does exist, too) turned the election.
As time has gone by, however, more detailed study of the election patterns has revealed, as Terry Mattingly has written before, that research into the demographic spread of voting shows that Rust Belt working class Catholics shifted the election in favor of Trump in 2016.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/9/9/rust-belt-religion-do-political-reporters-get-that-catholics-are-the-key-voters-in-2020
The live question is whether Biden and company can appeal to those voters and also to Latino Catholic communities to vote for him against Trump. The background question to that question is the extent to which the DNC may have embraced and endorsed views on, for instance, abortion that Catholics may not be reconciled to even if they may be sympathetic to the DNC on immigration, for instance.
Mattingly is, if memory serves, Eastern Orthodox, and so is not writing as someone who is addressing this set of questions as a Catholic might but it's coverage worth keeping tabs on because one of the probably strategies that conservative evangelicals who support Trump may yet deploy could be to point out that they have been scapegoated as if their votes were chiefly responsible for Trump's election when such is arguably not the case. To put this another way, they were likely to vote reluctantly for DT in any event if the alternative was Clinton (a black friend of mine who surprised me by explaining enthusiastically why he always supported Trump told me that black incarceration under Bill Clinton went up and that there were other candidates the DNC could have backed, like possibly Sanders, who wouldn't have had that baggage in a race against Trump).
Now I get at an intellectual level why some conservatives think that Trump is the first post-World War II candidate to point out that the pax Americana of the Cold War era no longer benefits working class people and that this has to change. To the extent that liberals and progressives and leftists take this to mean that Trump represents an end of "democracy" the trouble that may come up (since I read conservatives consistently enough to have spotted this) is that there's a big difference between "democracy" as a form of governance and "democracy" as a shorthand for Atlanticist internationalist neoliberal globalism. I.e. people who voluntarily voted for Trump may not have been voting against "democracy" as much as they were voting against what they believed was an Atlanticist internationalist neoliberal globalist hegemony ... and at the risk of just saying what this might mean, my aforementioned black friend who surprised me by backing Trump also told me that he figured if the race in `16 had been between Trump and Sanders that Sanders might have won.
Failing to capture the hearts and votes of fly over America on the way to securing the coastal elites turned out to be a losing strategy. Following what The Stranger called ignoring flyover America as not even the real America compared to the urban city scenes backfired. There are debates about the viability and legitimacy of the electoral college and yet compared to voter suppression battles and gerrymandering much of the ink spilled in cyberspaced about the illegitimacy of the DT victory has leaned toward Russia. There have been two parallel red scares in the last four years, the Republican one that is worried about "cultural Marxism" and the Democratic one that is worried about "Russian hacking" and while both take on conspiracy theory elements very quickly and heavily there is at least some plausibility to key elements of both theories.
But if people stick to the level of the Randall Balmer piece on how evangelicals gained momentum opposing racial integration in schools (this did happen) or Mark Driscoll name-dropping Margaret Sanger's views on race then white progressive and conservative scapegoating to make each other seem like the "real" racists is going to be a sideshow ... which doesn't mean this won't keep happening in an election year.
Even if his popularity is waning at the moment there's no reason to forget that Democrats thought it was inevitable Clinton would win four years ago and that's not what happened.
I admit to being the kind of dour Calvinist pessimist who thinks it's already too late for the United States as it is and that we're on a downward spiral and that DT getting the nom at all signaled bad things about the nature of who gets so far in candidacy terms but that there was nothing in "I'm with her" that boded well for the alternative. Campaigns of "did you see what THEY stand for!?" won't cut it. Per the above article, if Biden wants to win he has to win back to his team the people who shifted to DT four years ago and whether or not that's feasible remains to be seen. To go by what happened last time nobody should hold their breath.
Not that I'm a futurist dispensationalist (I'm an amillenial partial preterist), but if I were still a futurist dispensationalist of the old Pentecostal variety and heard word that Trump was starting to broker any kind of effective peace talks in the Middle East I'd be remembering how dispensationalists have some hsitory of warning that the Antichrist in the End Times timeline would be someone who brokers an effective peace agreement in the Middle East. Again, I'm not a dispy (let the reader understand, and if not, seriously go do some digging on eschatological schools of thought regarding Christian apocalyptic literature before you even think of commenting), but if I were one reports of a Trump-brokered peace deal in the Middle East would get me thinking about how U.S. dispensationalists used to talk about how this would be a possible sign of the Antichrist being in the world.
There are plenty of other reasons to not be happy about his administration than things like that, but if someone wanted to remind dispensationalist futurists to be cautious about world leaders who broker peace agreements in the Middle East related to dispensationalist futurist timelines ... keep it in mind.
It's also been talked about for a while now ...
https://christinprophecyblog.org/2017/06/the-antichrist-makes-peace-with-israel/
as one comment put it, if the Antichrist is to be loved by people around the world then Trump sure doesn't fit that bill.
There's also going to be the whole secret Rapture element, too ... as there's a streak in dispensationalism that speculates as to stuff that will happen that futurist dispensationalist pretribulation Rapture advocates believe they won't be stuck in ...
https://christinprophecyblog.org/2017/06/the-antichrist-makes-peace-with-israel/
If, however, some form of apostate fusion of civil religious cult (think Caeser's imperial cult) with some modified form of Christianity were to be used then the prospect of an American President being "the Antichrist" suddenly becomes a thought futurist dispensationalists could entertain after generations of assuming The Antichrist would come from Europe or anywhere, really, but America.
Conservative Christians in the U.S. with a more dispensationalist futurist bent didn't start thinking a POTUS could be The Antichrist until ... Obama ...
https://www.charismanews.com/opinion/watchman-on-the-wall/50914-why-so-many-people-think-obama-is-the-antichrist
W was thought of as a potential Antichrist back in 2006 when The Seattle Weekly fielded the question.
https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/is-bush-the-antichrist/
So this pattern of people on the religious right and religious in the United States imagining the President is the Antichrist if the wrong party figure has it has been going on for decades. I lean toward a proposal that any President is an antichrist regardless of who wins the job. Some of them are better than others and for various reasons related to various issues but, just in terms of Psalm 2, the U.S. is part of "the nations". The paradox of regarding the state, however terrible, as a necessary evil that at least has the capacity to punish evildoers a la Romans 13 as simultaneously the imperial cult that presents itself in civic religious terms as the one true god that cannot be denied permeates New Testament writings.
The tension isn't resolved because it won't be so long as there are humans alive on this planet. People who pull a John Macarthur or a Frank Schaeffer are making the same core mistake, whether it's the former functionally saying you have no choice but to vote for DT or the latter declaring Obama would save our nation a few years back and yet here we are. As the late Christopher Hitchens revealed in his stumping for Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror, even atheists of the New Atheist variety could wind up cheerleading American civic religion in foreign policy terms so we're not dealing with a situation where the absence of theism is any safeguard against militaristic cheerleading.
Endorsing earthly empires is not the way to go, not that anyone really has a reason to care what I think about that topic. It might be because half my ancestry is Native American but there's been a big chunk of me that, even as a moderately conservative Christian, finds detestable about American civic religious cults, whether red state or blue state. By all means vote your conscience and make your case in the public sphere but salvation isn't going to come from that. If God is only in control when the person you want wins then that's a weak deity. Conversely, every empire has a shelf life and I openly think that the shelf life has been reached for the U.S. and that no matter who wins in 2020 the days of the United States being "leader of the free world" (assuming that "free world" was even free, which I honestly openly doubt) are over.
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