The GOP’s top “person of faith”: More Republicans think Trump is religious than Pence, Romney

More than half of Republicans view former President Donald Trump as a person of faith, placing him ahead of vocally religious politicians like former Vice President Mike Pence.

A new national poll conducted by HarrisX for the Deseret News showed. Registered voters were asked whether they believed a list of political figures to be people of faith with the results falling along party lines. Among Republicans, 53% deemed Trump a person of faith, a value greater than that of almost every other figure on the list; Mike Pence was given the consideration by 52% of Republican respondents. President Joe Biden topped the list for Democrats with 63%, while Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, rose to the top for Independents with 42% of them considering him a person of faith.

The former president also vaulted above his other GOP primary opponents with 47% of Republicans indicating they believe that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a person of faith, 31% saying the same for Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., 31% for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 30% for Vivek Ramaswamy and 22% for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Twenty-three percent of Republicans, on the other hand, dubbed Biden a person of faith and 12% said the same of Vice President Kamala Harris. 

At a June Faith & Freedom gala, Trump — who rarely discusses his own faith compared to Pence, a Christian, and Biden, a Catholic — said he had bolstered policies favored by Christian voters, including appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which later overturned Roe v. Wade. “No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” he said during the event, adding, “I got it done, and nobody thought it was even a possibility.”

The poll, which surveyed 1,002 registered voters, was conducted from Sept. 8-11 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.