Why Catholics Voted for Trump

As Democrats and others assess the fallout from last week’s red bombshell, they’re looking at surprises in the exit polls. Here’s one that shouldn’t be missed: The nation’s Catholic voters split 56 to 41 in favor of Donald Trump. 

In one way, that endorsement might seem to require explanation. After all, no one’s personal failings have been more exposed to global sunlight than Trump’s; and Catholics as a whole, unlike many evangelical Protestants, weren’t ground-floor MAGA fans. Even so, the fact that a Catholic majority in 2024 signed on to Trump-Vance makes inescapable sense, for at least three reasons. 

First, key Democratic party policies have been locked in combat with key Catholic moral teachings for a long time now—ever since yesterday’s “safe, legal, and rare” abortions became “always, forever, and lots.” Not only is this grim consensus longstanding. It is also enforced. “Pro-life Democrat,” once a political identity, is now an oxymoron. Nor is abortion the only issue forcing many believers into a choice between faith and party. From Obama’s disparaging of “guns and religion,” to Hillary’s “basket of deplorables,” to the baiting of Catholic nominees before Congress for being Catholic (see Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris), the party’s leaders have proved time and again that the Democrats have a Catholic problem. As of last week, a majority of voting Catholics seem finally to have noticed.

The record of the Biden-Harris administration, for its part, pushed some voters rightward on its own. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the Catholic vote by 5 percent. Biden and Harris then went on to back policies that antagonized many of those same voters. From support for initiatives like the Equality Act, which would have gutted religious freedom, to calling transgenderism “the civil rights issue of our time,” the second Catholic president seemed scripted by the decidedly un-Catholic Human Rights Campaign. In another eyepopper, the emboldened Biden-Harris Department of Justice alerted the FBI to a new “threat”: tradition-minded Catholics. The resulting FBI memorandum even suggested that the agency should infiltrate churches. Throughout these and other progressive indulgences, party-wide animosity toward the Dobbs decision and its Court architects, some of them Catholic, raged on.

Presidential candidate Harris alienated believers some more. She rejected the idea of religious exemption for abortion laws that, if put into practice, would have threatened Catholic health workers with fines, jail, or both. Her interviews with Catholic judicial nominees evoked McCarthyism (“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” she asked one). She even snubbed positive opportunities for engagement, failing to appear at the Al Smith Dinner in New York City, one of the few remaining feel-good, bipartisan social exercises in the country. It also raises money for the poor. 

A third development that gave Catholics and other Christians new reason to lean Republican was both unexpected and, for many religious voters, bracing: the addition to the ticket of Ohio senator JD Vance. Not only is Vance a convert who speaks eloquently about life, faith, and much else. He is the first unembarrassed Catholic politician of high executive rank in a very long time. 

Therein lies a tale that reaches beyond the election of 2024. American Catholics have grown resigned to the Joe Bidens, Nancy Pelosis, and Mario Cuomos among us—politicians who check their rosary beads at the office door, and wave anti-Catholic secular flags in public. Vance is something new: a convert who neither mumbles nor apologizes, and who translates Christian teaching into words that people anywhere can understand: Marriage is good, babies are great, pornography destroys love, we need to take better care of one another. He also observed, in a town hall event at the end of October, “Whether you vote for me, whether you vote for Donald Trump, whether you vote for Kamala Harris, don't cast aside family members and lifelong friendships. Politics is not worth it.” For believers schooled since childhood in the teaching that Caesar's claims are not pre-eminent, his distinction along those lines had to resonate—even, or maybe especially, in such a vehement political season. 

In the end, the 2024 election just might mark a turning point not only in national politics, but in the energy and self-understanding that Catholics bring to the public square. Given the Democratic party’s fierce rejection of certain bedrock teachings, the wonder isn’t that more American Catholics lined up for Trump-Vance. It’s that so many have tolerated being called haters and bigots, with little pushback, for so long. Religious voters are not a monolith, in the booth or anywhere else. And politicians, like princes, can and will break hearts. But in the historically wide margin handed to Trump-Vance, a phoenix of newly formed conviction seems to be rising. 

Maybe, just maybe, a critical mass of American Catholics is finally taking off the “Kick Me” sign.

Mary Eberstadt is a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. This essay is adapted from a column published in the French language edition of Aleteia.

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