We use “White Evangelical Protestant,” or WEP, to mean white, non-Hispanic respondents who answered yes to a single survey question: “Would you describe yourself as a ‘born-again’ or evangelical Christian, or not?”
The question has been asked in these same words in every election we cover. A “yes” takes in people who consider themselves born-again, people who consider themselves evangelical, and people who consider themselves both. Those are not the same thing, but the survey asks them together, and everyone we count answered the same question the same way.
We exclude anyone who claimed another religion or no religion at all. The survey asks “What is your present religion, if any?” A person who answers Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, another religion, or “nothing in particular” has answered that question. A person who answers “something else” has declined the list.
We count those who answered “something else,” because “Protestant” is a word many Protestants do not use about themselves — nondenominational Christians above all, who are far likelier to say they are Christian, or to name their church, than to call themselves Protestant. In 2008, and only in 2008, the survey followed up with those respondents and asked which church or group they belonged to. Among white respondents who had also said they were born-again or evangelical, 71.9 percent named a Protestant body, with Baptist and nondenominational churches accounting for more than half. Twenty-eight percent said “something else” a second time. Almost none named anything identifiably outside Protestantism — three Jehovah’s Witnesses out of 2,214 respondents. No later election asked that follow-up, so the measurement cannot be repeated.