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The Truth About a Viral Ted Cruz Quote About Christian Voters
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The Truth About a Viral Ted Cruz Quote About Christian Voters

It's real, but it refers to the 2012 election, not 2016.

Alec Dent
Aug 5, 2020
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An image of Sen. Ted Cruz with a quote attributed to him has gone viral on social media in the past few days. The quote reads: “In the last election 54 million evangelical Christians stayed home. If Christians will simply show up and vote our values we'll turn this country around.” On Facebook alone, the image has been viewed nearly 7 million times.

The quote is a real one, but it isn’t a recent one—Cruz said those words in an interview with The Brody File, a show on the Christian Broadcasting Network on July 21, 2015, and made similarcomments about evangelical turnout in the 2012 election in the months leading up to the Republican primary elections in 2015. The accuracy of Cruz’s claim was met with some skepticism in 2015, with one Intelligencer article pointing out that some number of Evangelicals in America stayed home because they aren’t old enough to vote. 

While the quote is real, its current circulation gives the impression that “the last election” Cruz was referring to is the 2016 election, not, as is actually the case, the 2012 presidential election.

If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com.

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Mudskipper
Aug 5, 2020

Whatever the number is for evangelicals who stayed home and didn't vote, the fact is that many of the cultural issues that evangelicals are concerned about can't be turned around through politics. They are, indeed, cultural. The number of religious "nones" in this country is likely to continue to rise, regardless of who is in office. Attitudes towards gays and gay marriage are probably going to continue to liberalize, regardless of who is in office. And from all polling I've seen, attitudes towards abortion have been pretty static for years, regardless of who is office. Yes, evangelicals can work to try to make things they don't like illegal, but with a substantial proportion of the country opposed to what they would like to do, all that would happen is the cultural wars would intensify and more of the people on the other side who can't get off their duffs to vote would start voting.

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Pat Riot
Aug 5, 2020

"Our values" being everything Donald Trump embodies.

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