Almost a third of white evangelicals say there is 'almost nothing President Trump could do to lose my approval'.
White men, those without a college degree and white evangelicals continue to be the president's strongest supporters, according to the latest research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
The annual American Values Survey, released on Tuesday, found 3 in 10 evangelicals said they were 'strong Trump supporters' meaning 'there is almost nothing he could do to lose their support' and another four in 10 said they were 'weak Trump supporters' meaning they approve of him but say it is possible for Trump to lose their support.
The data suggests white evangelicals are more and more aligned with Republicans as a whole, with 34 per cent of Republicans saying they are 'strong Trump supporters' and another 50 per cent saying they are 'weak Trump supporters'.
Similarly 72 per cent of white evangelicals approve of Trump's job performance – the highest of any religious grouping – and only slightly below Republicans as a whole on 84 per cent.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, highlighted that while Trump's approval ratings are low across the population as a whole, white evangelicals are maintaining their support.
'What struck me is that Trump supposedly got 81 percent of the white evangelical vote and he now has 72 percent approval, which means that white evangelicals are still tracking roughly what they voted,' he told The Christian Post.
'That suggests to me that if you looked at the Trump-backers among white evangelicals that he would have closer to 40 or 45 percent of "strong" support. ... I don't have historical data to fall back on ... but that would make sense in the sense that there are people even among supporters of Trump [that recognise] that there is something that they are not 100 percent on [about Trump]. [Maybe] his behaviour causes them to pull back.'
