White evangelicals in 1980 chose image over co-religionist Carter and backed Reagan

Evidence

In 1980, the election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own, evangelical voters bypassed the candidate who shared their faith tradition in favor of the one whose image and rhetoric more closely aligned with their values and aspirations. Guided by preachers like Robison, Falwell, and LaHaye, 67 percent of white evangelical voters chose Reagan over Carter; just four years earlier, Carter had received 49 percent of the evangelical vote and 56 percent of the white Baptist vote. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 244

Let’s go back to the 1980 presidential campaign, when evangelicals rejected one of their own, a Sunday school teacher and “born-again” Christian—the white Southerner who had dispatched George Wallace and turned his party finally and squarely against racism—in favor of the divorced and remarried former governor of California. Reagan was the first political figure embraced by the Religious Right, whose leaders have elevated him to something akin to patron saint. Is there something about Ronald Reagan that prefigured the racism of the Religious Right? — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s purpose: the exact quantitative evidence for evangelicals’ 1980 realignment and the ‘image and rhetoric over shared faith’ logic that explains Trump support later. — connects to: Progressive evangelicalism peaked in the mid-1970s with Carter’s election — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 72; Evangelicals punished Carter for abortion while Reagan had signed the most liberal abortion bill — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 131; Evangelicals’ turn against Carter was rooted in racial segregation defense, not abortion — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 138 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 244; Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 146