Really insightful 2022 analysis—that I’m only just now finding—from Musa al-Gharbi on evangelical voting habits over the past five decades. Highly recommended reading:

It is also critical to contextualize the reason white evangelicals are outliers. Overall, evangelicals today are clearly more progressive on issues like race, gender, sexuality than they were in Nixon’s time or even in Reagan’s (reflected, for instance, in the share of white evangelicals who express support for gay marriage or interracial unions or women in leadership roles).

The reason white evangelicals seem like outliers is that the rest of the public shifted earlier and more dramatically on many of these issues than white evangelicals did. Hence, even though white evangelicals and the rest of society are trending in the same general direction, the gap between them has continued to grow.

Put another way, evangelicals have not become more racist or sexist. If they seem more racist or sexist to contemporary social observers it’s likely because said social observers (especially highly-educated white liberals) have become significantly more progressive on social issues in recent years while white evangelicals have remained much more consistent. […]

However, the main factor allowing evangelicalism to persist in recent decades (relative to other forms of Christianity) has been shifts among non-whites. Indeed, white evangelicals comprise a significantly smaller share of evangelicals overall than they have in the past. Critically, non-white evangelicals tend to be broadly aligned ideologically with white evangelical peers, and are even more conservative than whites on many issues.