President Donald Trump relied on the support of white evangelical voters to win both of his presidential elections, in 2016 and 2024 — but a conservative writer argued on Sunday that he and his fellow Republicans may be gradually losing these same religious voters.

Writing in The New York Times, columnist David French described the surprising strength of Democratic nominee James Talarico, a state representative, compared with Republican candidate Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, in the Texas Senate race — a contest that will be decided by voters in November 2026 — and argued that “to understand the religious dynamics of the Texas race, it’s important to absorb the true depths of the ‘God gap’ in American politics. That gap isn’t just about white evangelicals (although it certainly is partly about them), and it’s one of the Democrats’ chief obstacles to obtaining a durable political majority.”

The stakes are structural: white evangelicals have anchored Republican electoral coalitions since the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, which is why even modest movement within the bloc tends to draw close scrutiny in reliably Republican states like Texas.

French continued: “Any discussion of the God gap does have to begin with white evangelicals. Their numbers are vast (far more than twice as large as Black Protestants, the most loyal religious Democratic voters), and they vote in lock step. In 2024, white evangelicals voted for Trump by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. Trump lost all other voters by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent.”

Although religious groups voted more heavily Republican in 2024 than in previous elections, French speculated that this may have had less to do with a permanent shift in party allegiances than with the possibility that “people of faith may not be lost to Democrats forever so much as they’re punishing Democrats — warning with their votes against the secularization and social radicalization of the far left.” To support that hypothesis, he noted that President Joe Biden outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris considerably among these groups between 2020 and 2024.

French is not alone in observing that the Christian right is losing political clout and that religious voters may swing toward the Democrats. Last month, The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone wrote that, ever since national abortion rights were overturned in the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Christian right organizations that had relied on the abortion issue to galvanize voters have been struggling instead.

“One of the major subplots in American politics over the past half-decade is evangelical Christians—the political constituency without which Trump would have never been elected president—becoming the dog that caught the car,” Perticone explained. “They just haven’t had much reason to go to the polls since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the legal right to an abortion in its landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.”

Trump’s behavior has also turned off some Christian voters. For example, John Whitehead — founder of the Rutherford Institute, an influential Christian legal advocacy organization — has argued that the movement has “gone astray” in the Trump era, as Alternet has previously reported.