In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump leaned heavily on his own version of the “silent majority,” hoping that a mythical demographic, which handed Richard Nixon two presidential victories, would carry him across the finish line. That prediction did not pan out in 2020—or in this year’s midterms. And after suffering three disappointing election cycles, Trump now appears to be faced with a silent majority of conservatives who are turning increasingly against him: evangelical voters.
“There’s a lot of people who share a lot of our similar thoughts but don’t want to go on record,” Bob Vander Plaats, one of America’s top evangelical thought leaders, who hesitantly backed Trump in 2016, tells me. “You can see that it’s almost a silent majority right now,” he says. Everett Piper, a Washington Times columnist and the former president of an evangelical…
