The Voters Forgot God's Plan (with McKay Coppins)
The Focus Group Podcast
The Bulwark
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Pence seems to think that he's destined to be president. The evangelical Christians in our focus groups did NOT get the memo. McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic joins Sarah to talk about the future of social conservatism in the Republican Party and Mike Pence's 2024 prospects.
show notes:
"God's Plan for Mike Pence" by McKay Coppins
https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/mckay-coppins/the-wilderness/9780316327466/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of |
| 0:14.8 | the Bullwork, and this week we're talking about faith in politics, specifically Evangelical |
| 0:22.0 | Christians who vote Republican. Now there's no doubt Evangelical Christians form a meaningful |
| 0:27.2 | chunk of the GOP base. A full 30% as of 2020 according to the Public Religion Research Institute. |
| 0:35.2 | And back in 2016 many were shocked to find that Trump's notable lack of moral character didn't |
| 0:40.4 | seem to face Christian voters. In fact they became some of his most devoted supporters. |
| 0:46.8 | Today we're going to hear from a group of Evangelical Christians who voted for Trump in both |
| 0:50.8 | 2016 and 2020 and talk about how they're sizing up GOP candidates for 2024, especially |
| 0:57.2 | fellow Christian Mike Pence who puts his faith front and center. My guest today is McKay |
| 1:03.3 | Coppins, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of The Wilderness. Deep inside the Republican parties |
| 1:09.5 | combative, contentious, chaotic quest to take back the White House. McKay, thanks for being here. |
| 1:15.2 | Thanks for having me. Now we're going to spend a lot of this show talking about the role |
| 1:19.5 | religion plays in American politics and specifically the Republican Party. But we need to talk a |
| 1:24.2 | bit about your reporting on Trump recently. You're out with a piece in the Atlantic on the most |
| 1:30.6 | MAGA CPAC ever. You said in your decade of covering the event you've never seen it more dead. |
| 1:36.6 | Just tell us what you saw at CPAC. Yeah, I mean I was struck by two things. One was how fully |
| 1:43.1 | Trump had captured the institution. Like everything about it from the swag that was being handed |
| 1:50.2 | out to the booths that were set up in the exhibit halls to the speakers who were chosen. All of it |
| 1:55.9 | was just kind of like a MAGA CPAC rally and that was not always the case. When I first started |
| 2:01.6 | covering it, it used to be this kind of place where you would have all the different factions of |
| 2:06.4 | conservatism show up and sort of like battle it out. Right? So you have like the Ron Paul libertarians |
| 2:12.8 | rigging the straw poll for Ron Paul and you had the social conservatives with like pro-life |
... |
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