... I suspect that Hillary running on a "pro life" platform would have done far better among evangelical white voters.
Those voters even forgave Bush Sr.'s former pro-choice beliefs once he flipped.
Carter won rural Southern voters in 1976, probably because he wore his religion on his sleeve. It was a different story just four years later.
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/25/jimmy_carters_evangelical_downfall_reagan_religion_and_the_1980_presidential_election/
By early summer, according to Robert Maddox, the White House liaison to the religious community, all kinds of antiJimmy Carter/pro-Reagan pieces of literature were being cranked out and mailed all over the country, supposedly bipartisan but always painting Reagan as the paragon of Christian virtue and Jimmy Carter as kind of the antichrist. The Reagan campaign took a brief hit when George H. W. Bush, a pro-choice Republican, was chosen for vice president. After an extended flirtation with Gerald R. Ford, Reagan selected Bush, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Reagans rival for the Republican presidential nomination, as his running mate. Bush immediately repented of his pro-choice views and pledged fidelity to the Republican platform, which, in a departure from 1976and one that signaled shifting political sentimentscondemned both abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.