https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206481356/republicans-israel-gop-middle-east-evangelicals-end-times-rapture-christians
Since the Hamas attack on Israel, Republican presidential candidates have been sniping at each other. The goal: to prove to Republican voters that they support Israel more strongly than their rivals.
Former Vice President Mike Pence declared on CNN, “this is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America’s role as leader of the free world.”
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott likewise slammed Ramaswamy for, at one point, saying he hoped the U.S. could eventually reduce aid to Israel.
Former President Trump, meanwhile, took aim at Democrats at a recent campaign rally, drawing a direct line between protecting Israel, being an evangelical Christian and voting Republican.
“I can’t imagine how anybody who’s Jewish or anybody who loves Israel — and frankly, the evangelicals just love Israel — I can’t imagine anybody voting Democrat,” he said bluntly.
To be clear, people of both parties widely expressed horror at Hamas’s attack on Israel. But there is a divide on public opinion toward the ongoing conflict and the history behind it, with Republicans being particularly pro-Israel.
That divide didn’t always exist; in the late 1990s, the Pew Research Center found that just over half of Republicans said they sympathize with Israel more than the Palestinians. By 2018, 8 in 10 Republicans said Israel. (Pew has since stopped asking that exact question, but more recent polling still shows a wide partisan gap in attitudes.)
And as Trump said, evangelicals are a big part of that shift.
The biblical connection to Israel
Conservative news sources can offer a glimpse of the biblical link between Israel and evangelical Christians. Baptist preacher and Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress recently told the network about what he sees as connections between current war and biblical descriptions of the end times.
