‘I am not the Catholic candidate for president,” the Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy said in a 1960 speech. That didn’t stop around three-quarters of the Catholics who voted in that year’s election from picking him, a huge deviation from the very close result overall.
In the years since, Catholic voters had started to behave a lot more like everyone else. But as Stephen White, a fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, explains on the site today, 2024 broke this trend. Exit polls show Donald Trump beating Kamala Harris among Catholics by 18 points, whereas Trump in 2020 had lost Catholics to Biden in 2020 by five points.
Why did this happen? White believes that Harris’s views on such matters as abortion and transgenderism meant that “she was a candidate who was always going to struggle with Catholic voters.” They appear to have recognized what I argued in September: that Harris was not the Catholic candidate. In a post-election memo, CatholicVote president Brian Burch argued that Trump’s promise to “protect Catholic families and institutions from the divisive overreach by the Harris-Biden administration” played a role in his margin of victory.
There are still things we don’t know about the Catholic vote in this election. As White explains, it is still unclear how it was distributed, and how strongly it was driven by a swing in the heavily Catholic Latino vote. It is also too soon to tell how heavily this new coalition depends on Trump himself. So long as Democrats have to deal with what Burch describes as “the growing influence of the progressive wing of the party that is openly hostile to people of faith,” Catholic voters may feel more compelled to vote for Republicans. But White is surely correct to caution that “they certainly should not take the Catholic vote for granted.” What has changed before can change again.