Democrats, the analysis found, ran particularly well this year among white working-class women who are not evangelicals, a group that also displayed substantial disenchantment in the exit poll with Trump's performance. Those women could be a key constituency for Democrats in 2020 in pivotal Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where relatively fewer blue-collar whites are also evangelical Christians. [...]
Many of the party's potential 2020 contenders appear better suited to energizing its new base than recapturing working-class whites: Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke might all fit into that category. By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and centrists such as former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and outgoing Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper might be better positioned to reassure working-class white voters than to mobilize the base. [...]
To start, this analysis underscores how many white working-class voters are also evangelical Christians. Nationwide, the exit poll found that evangelical Christians this year comprised fully 45% of all white voters without a college degree, a substantial portion of the total electorate. By contrast, evangelicals represented only one-fourth of college-educated white voters. (In 2016, the exit polls found that evangelicals constituted slightly larger shares of each group.) [...]
PRRI surveys also show that among non-evangelical whites, those without degrees are consistently more conservative than those with degrees on polarizing cultural and racial issues. Results from PRRI's 2018 American Values Survey, for instance, found that among whites who are not evangelicals almost exactly twice as many of those without college degrees as those with advanced education said that discrimination against whites is as great a problem as discrimination against minorities. That placed those blue-collar whites much closer to the position of white evangelicals than to that of their fellow non-evangelicals who have college degrees.
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