CatholicVote is ratcheting up its efforts to turn out religious voters in key midterm races by appealing to their concerns about parental rights, the political action committee announced Thursday.
The last-minute $2 million spending blitz features an ad titled, “Can You Trust Them?” which is micro-targeted to mass-attending Catholics and is expected to be seen by close to a million voters in the final ten days before the midterm elections.
The campaign is encouraging observant Catholic voters to stay away from Democratic Catholic candidates Mark Kelly in Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and Tim Ryan in Ohio given their positions on parental rights, “especially on issues of gender procedure and abortion for minors,” CatholicVote said in a press release.
“Catholic voters have the right to know where candidates stand on the issue of parental rights. Democratic candidates including Kelly, Cortez Masto, and Ryan are actively working to exclude parents from some of the most important decisions affecting their children,” CatholicVote’s president Brian Burch said in a statement. “They label themselves Catholic but support policies contrary to parents’ wishes, good medicine, and their own church’s teaching. The fact that these so-called Catholic politicians want to ban parents from having a say in these difficult decisions is disgraceful.”
CatholicVote’s last-ditch salvo comes as Republicans appear to have the momentum on their side less than two weeks out from the midterms. In an effort to reverse that trend, particularly among younger voters, President Biden and top Democrats have made a push in recent weeks to highlight cultural issues, such as abortion access and transgender rights, with Biden sitting down with a transgender social-media influencer last week at the White House.
While it may sure up support among young progressives, the emphasis on gender ideology and abortion is likely to hurt Biden among centrist voters. A comfortable majority of registered voters now say they are “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to teachers instructing students about “sexual orientation and gender identity,” recent polling in the New York Times found.
This applies particularly to Catholics. Despite Biden being the second Catholic president in American history, his popularity amongst Catholics, particularly those who regularly attend mass, continues to crater.
The ads will be aired in English as well as Spanish and will be played in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Texas, and Nevada against the backdrop of close House races.