In the Republican presidential race, several candidates have tried to woo evangelical voters, and even though they were a substantially smaller voting bloc in Tuesday’s New Hampshire Primary, they still had an impact on the final results.
One of the big surprises was the third-place finish posted by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), causing some to assume an “evangelical surge” helped his cause. While that may be true to a certain extent—evangelical turnout in 2016 was 3 percentage points higher than in 2012—he wasn’t the top pick of evangelicals in the Granite State.
That honor went to national front-runner Donald Trump, who took 27 percent of the evangelical vote, according to exit polling. Cruz came in second with 23 percent of evangelical support, followed by Marco Rubio (13 percent) and John Kasich (11 percent).
The rest of the evangelical support was spread relatively evenly across the remaining candidates on the ballot—there were 30, including several of the major candidates who had already dropped out after the candidate filing deadline.
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