EVANGELICAL MIGHT — It’s been a punishing couple of years for religious conservatives. First there was Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020. In recent months, the rise of Christian nationalism in the midterms has drawn unflattering attention . And this week thousands of Southern Baptists spent much of their annual meeting discussing — and apologizing for — a sexual abuse scandal that has roiled the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. All this as Americans appear to be growing less religious. Last year, Gallup reported church membership in the United States had fallen below a majority for the first time. But the religious right’s fortunes may be about to change. Christian conservatives this summer will likely be running victory laps, with the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade . Separately, the earliest stage of Republicans’ 2024 presidential primary campaign is picking up. This means that party heavyweights’ attention is focused on a swath of the electorate that, regardless of its overall standing in America, remains very much at the heart of the GOP. For the Christian right, it’s an uncommonly good confluence of timing, the force of which will be on display through Saturday at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Nashville — one of the more significant meetups of potential 2024 presidential candidates to date. Trump, who is now widely expected to run again in 2024, is scheduled to speak at the conference. Among other potential 2024 candidates expected to appear are former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will receive the “Ronald Reagan Defender of Freedom Award.” Ralph Reed, the longtime Republican strategist and founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, stands at the epicenter of the evangelical moment again. It was Reed who helped marshal support among skeptical evangelicals for Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, then literally wrote the book on the bargain many of them made for him. The payoff for evangelicals? In a measure of vindication for Reed and like-minded conservatives, they got enough Supreme Court justice appointments to put Roe on the chopping block. Today, said Jeff Roe, the Republican strategist who managed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016 and helped elect Glenn Youngkin governor of Virginia last year, “I’d be long on Ralph Reed stock if I was an aspiring presidential candidate.” The reason to think Roe may be right is in large part geographic. While white evangelicals account for only about 15 percent of the overall population, their share of the Republican electorate in early nominating states is far higher. In Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, more than 6 in 10 caucus-goers identified as evangelical or born-again Christians in the last competitive Republican nominating contest, in 2016. In the early primary state of South Carolina, that number exceeded 70 percent. Reed, who tracks those numbers as closely as anyone, said, “The idea that [the] constituency is declining in political significance is laughable.” He said, “In the Republican presidential nominating process, evangelical Christians today, in the Republican party, occupy a position of criticality and centrality that is analogous to the role that African Americans play in the Democratic Party.” That leaves Reed and his organization in an especially important place in the run-up to 2024. Brett Doster, a Florida-based Republican strategist who served as the state’s executive director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential reelection campaign, described conservative evangelicals as one of three wings of the Republican base, along with “blue-collar populists” and “anti-establishment libertarians.” “The Faith and Freedom folks will be relevant for long beyond ’24,” he said, “and yes, any presidential candidate will need them.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com or on Twitter at @davidsiders.
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