The Voters You Never Thought Would Support Trump

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Democrats routinely bashed Donald Trump for his demeaning comments about women. But  new findings show that didn't phase a surprising group of women voters.

The news media and Democrats often cited the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about groping women, his name-calling of debate moderator Megyn Kelly and his insult about fellow candidate Carly Fiorina's face.

Despite this, close to three-quarters of young, white evangelical women voted for him – a much higher number than their male counterparts.

"It's a pretty significant difference," Dr. Ryan Burge, political science instructor at Eastern Illinois University, told CBN News.

Burge discovered the numbers while looking at the Harvard-based Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) which sampled 64,600 voters before and after the election, including 15,700 evangelicals.

Burge found that 73 percent of white evangelical women under 35 voted for Trump compared to 60 percent of white evangelical men their age. "That was the only age group where women were stronger with Trump," said Burge.

Why did these young evangelical women vote so heavily for Trump? Political researchers are still trying to figure that out.

"We really don't have a theory on why," said Burge, noting that research usually lags about two years behind election cycles.

Several experts suggested to Christianity Today that evangelical millennial women could have based their votes on the issues that Trump campaigned on instead of his character.

Penny Young Nance, president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), said she believes many conservative women made that decision.

Dr. Scott Waller, political science chair at Biola University, said that national security could have been a top issue for these women.