Donald Trump Calls Out Gun Owners, Evangelical Christian Voters

Former President Donald Trump called on gun owners and evangelical Christians to vote for him in this year’s election during a campaign rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Sunday, citing low voter turnout among those demographics.
Gun control remains one of the most contentious issues in American politics, but it has taken a backseat this election cycle, with voters’ primarily concerned with the economy, immigration and abortion.
However, in response to several gun violence incidents across the country, such as the Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Georgia, on September 4, when a student allegedly killed four people, including two of his classmates, gun safety made headlines on the campaign trail as both Trump, the GOP nominee, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, aim to address guns and gun violence.
During his rally in Wisconsin, a battleground state, Trump called on gun owners on Sunday to go out and vote, citing that despite his endorsement from the National Rifle Association (NRA) he received back in May, gun owners don’t “vote much.”
“You know you have a lot of people out there that don’t vote, that love us, but don’t vote. You know who doesn’t vote much? Rifle owners. We are Second Amendment people; the NRA gave us complete and total endorsement. And during that…they did tell me that people who own guns and rifles don’t vote relatively, a very small percentage, like 15 percent,” the former president said. “If you would vote nobody would beat us.”
Newsweek could not independently verify that number and reached out to the NRA via email for comment.
While gun ownership does fall along partisan lines, gun owners typically lean towards voting Republican as the Democratic Party has generally supported more gun control measures as opposed to the GOP.
A study published in Social Science Quarterly in 2017, examined the connection between gun ownership and vote choice. Using information from the General Social Survey—which gathers data on American society to monitor and explain trends in attitudes and behaviors—every four years from 1972 to 2012, University of Kansas researchers found that gun owners and non-owners select candidates based in part on their commitment to firearms and exposure to gun culture. According to the data, since the Richard Nixon-era of the 1970s, possessing a firearm has increased the likelihood of voting for Republican candidates.
Trump also called on evangelical Christians to go out and vote, “I’ll tell you another one that don’t vote, I love these people, evangelical Christians. The Christian community doesn’t vote as much as they should; they go to church. So now what we are going to do is go to church and we are to get out and vote…If they did vote, we couldn’t lose an election.”
Newsweek has also reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment.
This comes as evangelical Christians are a key voter bloc for Republicans, whose support for culturally right-wing policies like opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ+ rights have long drawn socially conservative, highly religious voters. High turnout among white evangelical voters would be key to a Trump victory in November, but his relationship with the bloc has faced some tension, as his positions on some of these social issues have at times been less rigid than those of other conservatives.
According to a poll from Lifeway Research, Trump’s support among Christian pastors has changed since 2020 with 61 percent of evangelical pastors who responded to the poll said they plan to vote for Trump, compared to 68 percent in a poll conducted in September 2020.
The survey was conducted among 1,003 Protestant pastors from August 8 to September 3. The earlier polling of 1,000 Protestant pastors was held from September 2 to October 1, 2020. In 2020, the poll found Trump with a 32-point lead over President Joe Biden (53 to 21 percent) while the current poll shows the former president with a 26-point lead over Harris (50 to 24 percent).
Sunday’s campaign rally comes after Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday to complete the speech that was cut short following the assassination attempt on his life on July 13 at the Butler Farm Show.
Trump has consistently defended gun rights and is expected to be the keynote speaker at the NRA’s “Defend the 2nd” event in Savannah, Georgia, on October 22.
Harris has also recently made headlines as she spoke about being a gun owner herself, hoping to appeal to moderate and even right-leaning voters who may be wary of a second Trump term but still have reservations about the Democrats’ positions on issues like gun control.
Harris revealed her personal gun ownership to the surprise of many viewers, during the September 10 debate with Trump and gave more details in her first solo TV interview of the election cycle with Oprah Winfrey last month.
“I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, and I’m in favor of assault weapons bans, universal background checks, and red flag laws,” Harris said at the “Unite for America” event. “These are just common sense.”