The evangelical primary has already started. Rubio has the early edge on Vance.

The evangelicals who helped elect Donald Trump president are already sizing up his successor.

So far, many of them believe that Marco Rubio has the edge.

Prominent evangelicals see the secretary of State as a figure who can win over both Trump’s MAGA party of today and the Reagan-era conservatives who once ran Washington. But they note that their rank-and-file voters remain genuinely open to Vice President JD Vance, particularly younger Americans who are curious about what a more populist social conservatism might look like under Vance’s stewardship.

"[Rubio] has a great deal of trust and admiration from conservative evangelicals and an amazing story that appeals to evangelicals looking for candidates to support,” said Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a leading voice in conservative evangelical politics. "Marco Rubio is far better known to American evangelicals than JD Vance."

"Both of them are in a superb position to speak to the conservative Christian base,” Mohler added, but “Rubio has more experience doing that."

For many in these circles, it comes down to a simple calculus: Rubio has spent decades earning their trust on faith and policy — while Vance, despite his platform and base, has left key anti-abortion and pro-Israel constituencies on edge.

The 2028 Republican primary, already shaping up behind the scenes, will be the first real test of what role the evangelical voters who made Trump possible — but who haven’t always been happy with how he’s executed on their top priorities — will have in shaping the post-Trump GOP. The outcome will have far-reaching implications for the party's agenda, including on issues like abortion, U.S.-Israel policy and the role of government in public life.

Social conservatives — and specifically evangelical Protestants — are mathematically indispensable to winning the Republican presidential nomination. White evangelical Protestants backed Trump at a rate of 82 percent in 2024 — a figure that has held steady for three consecutive election cycles. In Iowa and South Carolina alone, two states that typically cast ballots early in the GOP primary process, they make up a commanding majority of the primary electorate.

“There is no path to the nomination that doesn't run through the tollbooth of the evangelical vote,” said Ralph Reed, the longtime evangelical kingmaker and founder and chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Spokespeople for Vance and Rubio did not respond to requests for comment about their relationship with evangelicals.

No candidates have officially announced, though some evangelicals hope for a dark horse candidate like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. If Trump himself anoints a successor, that would make mounting a primary challenge difficult. But whenever the race takes shape, evangelicals are expected to be a must-win constituency for any Republican hoping to reach the White House in 2028.

And early sorting behind the two candidates reveals fault lines within the coalition itself — between those who see Rubio as a restoration of something familiar, and those who wonder if that's exactly the wrong lesson to draw from the Trump era.

Rubio has a longstanding relationship with evangelicals, including from his 2016 presidential run, and though he is Catholic, he has also regularly attended a Southern Baptist megachurch in Miami. Evangelicals see in Rubio a familiar fluency — a politician who speaks their language naturally, and who has spent decades building relationships with the institutions that matter most to them, while his tenure as Trump’s secretary of State has cemented his place in the MAGA fold.

Rubio earned plaudits from across the evangelical community for his remarks at Charlie Kirk's memorial service last fall. Speaking less like a politician than a preacher, he delivered a full accounting of the gospel — the creation, the fall, the incarnation, the resurrection — in plain, declarative language that left little ambiguity about where he stood. Evangelical leaders described it as a powerful articulation of faith from an elected official.

It's a reputation Rubio has been building for years. At a 2016 presidential forum in Iowa, moderator Frank Luntz posed a question to the then-candidate — and Rubio reached for the Bible sitting on the table in front of him, unprompted, and answered directly from scripture.

“Rubio went right to the scripture — and I forget what the scripture was — but then laid it out, and really did a masterful job of it,” Bob Vander Plaats, president of The Family Leader, which hosted the event, recalled in a recent interview. “Rubio is not shy about sharing his faith.”

Vance, who Vander Plaats met with during the vice president’s recent trip to Iowa, is less known to evangelicals. He’s an Ohio native whose first real exposure to institutional church was his father's large Pentecostal congregation, and who for a while identified as an atheist before converting to Catholicism — a particularly traditionalist strain of Catholicism that has become increasingly influential in conservative circles. In Vance, evangelicals see a more complicated figure: intellectually serious, culturally fluent but still defining himself in ways that leave some key questions unanswered.

“JD, I would say, is more stoic, but also one that I think evangelicals have confidence in that he has a very solid base. That his faith drives him. It’s not something that he uses to get a vote,” Vander Plaats said.

At a Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Wisconsin the morning after he officially selected the nomination to be Trump’s running mate 2024, Vance offered a window into his faith that was both personal and unconventional. He opened by invoking Jules, the philosophical hitman from the movie Pulp Fiction, to make a point about miracles — then pivoted to something quieter and more personal. The night before the biggest speech of his life, he told the crowd, he had lain awake at 3 a.m., anxious and unable to sleep.

After 30 minutes of counting sheep, he said simply: "Jesus, please help me." Three hours later he woke up, rested, telling the crowd, "I felt the touch of God.” It was a moment that evangelicals later described as authentic and relatable.

"Vance, in my view, is the closest candidate we have to somebody like Charlie Kirk,” said Frank Turek, a Christian apologist who was Kirk’s mentor and spoke at his memorial service. “Rubio appeals maybe to more traditionalists."

Vance is set to release a book on his faith next month titled “Communion” — his most sustained attempt yet to answer the questions evangelicals say they're still waiting to hear him address. That includes where he stands on Israel, a topic his allies have been vague about; how seriously he takes the anti-abortion movement's priorities; and whether the coalition he envisions has room for the traditional conservatives who remain wary of him.

"Marco doesn't wake up in the morning with a burning desire to run the traditional conservative wing out of the party,” said one conservative leader, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the primary dynamics. “JD considers it his life mission."

The tensions are perhaps most acute on abortion — the issue that, more than any other, cemented the relationship between evangelical voters and the Republican Party decades ago.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 — a decision made possible by the three justices Trump appointed — the anti-abortion movement has been pressing the administration to go further. Abortions are up since Roe was overturned, the abortion pill mifepristone remains widely available and the movement's institutional leaders have grown increasingly frustrated with the administration’s lack of action.

Some of that frustration has landed on Vance, who as vice president has been unable to create distance from the administration's record on abortion in the way a secretary of State can, both for better and for worse in the eyes of movement leaders. Vance headlined the March for Life in January, where he announced an expansion of the so-called Mexico City Policy, which prohibits non-government organizations that receive federal funding from even talking about abortion, but for anti-abortion leaders pressing for action on mifepristone and federal legislation, that hasn’t been enough.

SBA Pro-Life America — one of the most powerful institutional forces in the anti-abortion movement — has taken to referring to the administration as the "Trump-Vance administration" in its press releases, a deliberate signal to the vice president that the movement expects him to spend political capital on their priorities.

“This does not seem to be an accidental strategy, to try to be saying, ‘Come on Vance, like, use your sway with your boss,’” said an anti-abortion advocate who has been involved in coalition calls, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the move.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the organization pointed to a recent speech from its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, in which she spoke about her expectations about 2028 but did not address either Vance or Rubio by name.

The unease extends beyond abortion. For a significant slice of evangelical voters, unwavering support for Israel is a non-negotiable — rooted not just in geopolitics but in theology, in a tradition that sees the Jewish state as central to biblical prophecy.

On that question, Vance leaves some evangelicals uncertain. His foreign policy instincts run toward non-interventionism — a posture that has put him at odds, at times, with the administration's stalwart support for Israel. Rubio, by contrast, leaves little room for ambiguity.

Still, evangelicals see in Vance something that genuinely excites them — a vision of government that doesn't just protect religious conservatives from an encroaching secular culture, but actively works to restore the conditions for family and community life to flourish. It's a departure from the defensive crouch of the Obama era, when the dominant framework was religious liberty — the idea that the government's job was to stay out of the way of people of faith. For a younger generation of social conservatives, that framework feels like a losing strategy.

His intellectual formation — steeped in Catholic social thought and a populist critique of market liberalism — maps onto that hunger. When Vance traveled to Europe shortly after taking office and invoked Augustine's "order of loves" to argue for a nationalism rooted in concentric obligations — family, community, nation — many in these circles took notice.

For all the enthusiasm Vance generates among a younger, more populist slice of the coalition, the question of whether that's enough to win remains unanswered — and won't be until 2026. And for all the Rubio enthusiasm, Mohler, for one, isn't ready to close the book on Vance.

"He's going to have to fill that out a good bit for evangelical voters to understand," Mohler said. "I think he has plenty of opportunity to do that."