After Iowa, South Carolina provides another opportunity for Republicans to appeal to evangelical voters. 

By Brent Griffiths |   [email protected]

Launching into his Iowa caucus  night victory speech on Feb. 1, the eighth word that came out of the first-ever Latino to win a presidential caucus — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — was God. Not a surprise for a candidate who frequently invokes the religious journey of his father, Pastor Rafael Cruz, but a hint at one of the coalitions that was key to his success.

Self-described evangelicals have long played a history in Iowa’s Republican caucuses, and despite the eccentricities of some of the candidates, 2016 proved to be the same. Such results could foreshadow what might occur in the first-in-the-South primary in South Carolina.

“While people in the rest of the country seem to be going to church less … South Carolina is still the buckle of the Bible Belt,” said Gibbs Knotts professor and the head of political science at the College of Charleston.

The Palmetto State hews to the evangelical demographic of the Iowa caucuses much more closely than New Hampshire’s primary. The Granite state is the second most secular state in the nation, but South Carolina is in the top five most religious, according to a Gallup Poll But it should be noted the study places Iowa further down — 21 to be exact according to most recent poll conducted in 2014.

Support among these faith-centered voters powered televangelist Pat Robertson to a second place finish in 1988 and in recent years pushed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to unexpected victories in Iowa. And while the fervor of anger has been one of the main stories on both sides, Cruz’s win is not surprising to someone like Christopher Budzisz, director of the Loras College Poll.

“Yet again, evangelicals largely coalesced around one candidate,” Budzisz said.

Such a shift would seem to favor a hopeful like Cruz who has made very public efforts to organize pastors in Iowa and has followed the same setup in South Carolina.

But based on recent public-opinion polls and interviews with political experts, the first primary south of the Mason-Dixon line is Trump’s to lose.

In fact, recent surveys of the state show white born-again evangelical support is too close to call between Cruz and Trump.

The union between a twice-divorced, brash, billionaire businessman and reality-TV star and evangelical conservatives may appears odd to say the least, said Dan Mathewson, a religion professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg. But Mathewson’s research into the class divide among Southern evangelicals might explain Trump’s following.

“What is happening is this class division and fault line that has always been has be coming more salient,” said Mathewson who is an expert on American evangelism and has focused on upstate South Carolina, one of the state’s hotbeds for the cohort.   “They are attracted to Trump’s message of outsider anger that resonates with their experience about being the outsider.”

Asked why such a divide did not appear as noticeable on Feb. 1., Budzisz pointed out that the caucuses tend to attract more affluent and higher educated voters.

The feeling of poor white Southerners being forgotten is rooted in pre-Civil War America, Mathewson said. But the chasm was only widened by Reconstruction and in recent decades exacerbated by rapid pace of globalization that continued the movement away from textile mill towns to multinational corporations.

But then there are Trump’s flubs at professing his faith.

This summer in Ames, Trump said he had never asked God for forgiveness — something that appears foreign to believers who openly profess that they ask almost daily. At Liberty University, a private Christian college founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell in in the 1970s, Trump elicited laughter and corrections from students when he called second Corinthians “two Corinthians.” These examples say nothing of the New Yorker’s proclivity to hurl vulgarity and insults at his fellow Republican hopefuls and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But, Mathewson said, those examples are not nearly as important.

“The fact that he does not speak language of evangelicalism all that convincingly is secondary,” Mathewson said of his appeal among poor white Southerners.

While overshadowed by his public doubting of Sen. John McCain as a war hero, Trump’s comments about faith over the summer led to audible hushes and far more subdued crowd — to say nothing of the setting, which was an annual event for the Family Leader, an Iowa social-conservative-centric nonprofit founded by Bob Vander Plaats, a 2010 primary opponent to then-former Gov. Terry Branstad. A leading voice in the uproar after the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Vander Plaats eventually backed Cruz.

Beyond just demographics, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses have long winnowed large fields of candidates. But as locals look to results in South Carolina this Saturday they will be curious if more establishment type Republicans can wiggle their way back into the conversation.

“From the beginning, it’s been a three-man race,” said Will Rogers, chairman of the Polk County GOP.

Rogers said maybe after the weekend, establishment Republicans will have their answer on if the alternative to Cruz and Trump is Sen. Marco Rubio, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

“…This in many ways is the last chance to emerge as one of the viable candidates,” said Charles Bierbauer, dean and professor of the University of South Carolina’s College of Information and Communications and a former CNN political correspondent.

And as for evangelicals, the efforts to curry their support are unlikely to fade anytime soon. Super Tuesday is less than a month away and for the first time features the “SEC primary,” a collection of Southern states including: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Half of those states are in the top-10 most religious states in the entire country.