Donald Trump’s primary run left him with few friends among evangelical leaders, who are now weighing sitting out the general election entirely. But there is one way, they say, to win them back: picking a vice presidential candidate socially conservative enough to compensate for Trump’s many heresies.

Several of the country’s top socially conservative leaders, from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America, said Trump’s choice of running mate would be among the most important factors in deciding whether to activate their extensive grass-roots networks on the real estate billionaire’s behalf.


“Who’s he going to surround himself with? The first indication is going to be vice presidential choice,” said Bob Vander Plaats, who served as Ted Cruz’s national co-chairman and is revered in Iowa evangelical circles.

“He’s not part of the Republican conservative family,” added Richard Viguerie, a longtime fixture of conservative politics with close ties to evangelical power brokers. “He needs to prove to us that he’s worthy of our support. It’s not sufficient to say he’s not Hillary. He needs to do more than that. … The ballgame on that is personnel.”

Several people mentioned Cruz as an ideal pick, though there’s little indication either Trump or Cruz would be interested in a joint ticket after their bruising primary contest.

Beyond a deeply socially conservative running mate, the leaders said that if Trump were to highlight a substantive and detailed commitment to conservative Supreme Court justices, he would go a long way toward easing many top conservatives’ deep-seated concerns about him.

But there is no evidence at this point that Trump has plans to name a running mate with appeal to the evangelical community. He has been dismissive of the need to unify the party, telling MSNBC last week: “I don't think it’s imperative that the entire party come together.” And Ben Carson, a former presidential candidate who is helping with Trump’s running mate search, initially said that Trump would look at Democrats (though Trump later ruled that out).

A representative for Trump didn’t respond to requests for comment.

If he doesn’t find someone acceptable to evangelical leaders, he risks completely turning off some of the party’s most dedicated activists, a key part of the traditional GOP base — and a problem as he tries to erase his deficit in the polls against likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“If Trump is going to be successful against Hillary, he’s going to need the Tony Perkinses of the world, the Dr. [James] Dobsons, the Bob Vander Plaatses engaging and encouraging their networks,” Vander Plaats said. “Right now, I don’t see a lot of that. I see a lot of people with huge cause for concern. We really don’t know what we’re going to get with Donald Trump.”

“The choice is not him or Hillary,” added Nance, the head of Concerned Women for America, a prominent conservative group focused on bringing “biblical principles” to public policy. “The choice is him or don’t vote. ... That’s really my concern, that people just stay home.”

Trump has stoked significant qualms among socially conservative leaders over both his past political views, including a relatively moderate approach, for example, to abortion and Planned Parenthood. His personal background, which includes three marriages and a record of bragging about sexual exploits, doesn’t help either.

Perkins noted that Republican Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas had already been hit with an ad that sought to tie him to Trump’s past inflammatory comments about women.

“That is going to be used to suppress evangelical support and turnout for him,” Perkins said. “He has to counter that. The only way he counters that is …[with a] running mate, how he vets judicial nominees and what does he do with the party platform.”

Certainly, the extent to which Trump needs support from evangelical leaders to win over evangelical voters remains an open question.

In the Republican primaries, Trump demonstrated an ability to perform with just about every Republican constituency, beating out Cruz, for example, for the evangelical vote in South Carolina even though Cruz had support from many of the most prominent evangelical leaders in both the state and the country.

But in a general election matchup that Trump begins, according to most polls, well behind Clinton, he needs every element of the usual Republican base to turn out. That includes very religious evangelical voters, plenty of whom also tend to be active Republican volunteers — and that subset of the conservative vote has long been hostile to Trump.

“The evangelical activists, those who attend church regularly, were always Trump’s weakness,” said Chris Wilson, who headed research and analytics for the Cruz campaign. “Those are the voters Trump had and continues to have the highest negatives with. It’s going to be very difficult to get them excited about his campaign in the fall. No question those make up a core part of any winning Republican coalition.”

The movement’s leaders are confident that their endorsements and their networks still matter.

“There’s a big difference between me saying I don’t think we should do a third party, and giving a full-throated endorsement in which I actually work for him and get out the vote for him,” Nance said, saying that she’s not at all committed yet to doing the latter. “It remains to be seen how involved our ladies will be.

“Door-to-door leaflets, sign waving, that’s the thing my ladies do,” she continued. “We’re the legit activists. We do it for free. Phone banking, hours and hours of phone banking, that’s a necessary part of the campaign. You can’t buy that.”

A pastor prays for Donald Trump after a Sunday service at First Christian Church in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in January. | AP Photo

Karen Fesler, an Iowa-based GOP activist who has worked closely with Christian conservative voters, said that evangelicals in the past two presidential cycles weren’t particularly motivated to turn out for Mitt Romney or John McCain (though some Republicans have disputed the extent to which turnout really dropped off).

Regardless, that apathy will be worse this cycle, she predicted. “I think they will probably stay home,” she said. “That’s what I’m hearing. That’s what happened four years ago, that’s what happened eight years ago.”

Asked whether she expected that trend to be worse this time, she replied, “probably.”

“If you look at 2008 and 2012, when there was indifference toward John McCain and Mitt Romney on behalf of evangelicals, they stayed home,” Perkins said. “This situation is even more difficult for Donald Trump. It’s not just indifference, but it’s outright opposition.”

Given that the movement’s voters are extremely unlikely to favor Clinton, the choice between her and Trump presents an agonizing choice.

Eric Teetsel, Marco Rubio’s former head of faith outreach, said conservative Christians are facing “a crisis of conscience.”

“There are those who say, when it comes to voting for the lesser of two evils, I’m going to pick neither, and those who say, ‘I don’t like Trump, he was not my first or second or 10th choice, but he is, we think, better than the Democratic alternative,’” Teetsel said.

Asked about what he would do personally, Teetsel paused.

“I don’t think, in good conscience, I could vote for Donald Trump,” he said.

He said he will likely write in Rubio instead.