The elusive Catholic vote
Race for the White House
A Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch of the 2020 US presidential election now appears inevitable. What role will Catholics play in the contest?
TWO THESES, seemingly contradictory, have encapsulated the shifting, complicated, and decisive role Catholics play in US politics over the past few decades. The first is, “There is no such thing as ‘the Catholic vote’.” The second is, “The Catholic vote will decide the election.”
The 1960 election of John Kennedy formed people’s belief in a monolithic “Catholic vote”. Images of nuns in full habit carrying “We Love Jack” signs reflected the tribal pride many Catholics took in the prospect of a co-religionist ascending to the highest office in the land, and he garnered the support of about 80 per cent of Catholic voters. People forgot that many Catholics, including Kennedy’s father Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, had staunchly supported a Republican Catholic of national prominence, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the anti-communist witch hunter whose scurrilous tactics finally caused his colleagues to censure him. Or that hundreds of thousands of Irish and German Catholics had previously turned against the Democrats when Franklin Roosevelt turned toward the defence of Great Britain, before the attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the US into the war.
Gradually in the post-war era, due to both demographic changes and cultural assimilation, Catholics became more evenly divided between the two political parties. This gave Catholics their decisive role on election day. White, evangelical Christians vote disproportionately for the Republicans; non-believers are overwhelmingly Democratic. Catholics straddle the electorate. By the time Joe Biden became the second Catholic to win the White House in 2020, he received only about half of the votes of his co-religionists.
“MANY US Catholics’ alignment with the Republican Party originates from common approaches to social issues like abortion,” says Kim Daniels, director at the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, Georgetown University. “For many that alignment continued through the Trump administration despite his many stances against multiple Catholic social teachings, and even after 6 January and his efforts to steal the election. People I respect chose to support Trump to try to advance the pro-life cause, but the result was real harm to not only the pro-life movement itself, but also to the country.”
The US bishops also have been putting their thumb on the electoral scale to favour the Republicans ever since the 1970s, when Democrats came to embrace abortion rights and Republicans came to oppose them. “By now it’s a truism that American believers of all stripes, and Catholics as much as any, are shaped and led by their partisan loyalties far more than by their faith tradition,” says David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. “But in the case of American Catholicism, that development is also due in part to the fact that the US bishops’ conference has for so long tilted in a partisan direction thanks to two dynamics: one is the penchant for culture war politics that drove the hierarchy’s political posture for decades, and the second was opposition to legalised abortion, namely the Roe decision, that was the ‘pre-eminent priority’ of all its political activity.”
The interplay of particular issues and internal religious directives took place within a broader polarisation of the country between those who live in large, post-industrial metropolises with highly educated populations, strong local economies and libertarian social values and those who live in smaller cities and rural areas where farming, manufacturing, and mining once created vibrant economies and where social values are more traditional.
In cities like New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, organised religion does not have the cultural significance it once did, and the rise of the “nones”, those with no particular religious affiliation, overlaps with the political dominance of the Democratic Party. In the smaller cities of the North-east and Midwest which have fallen on hard times, Catholic and non-Catholic working-class voters who were once the backbone of the Democratic Party began shifting to the Republicans with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and they proved very receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant populism.
The abortion issue was totemic for working-class voters with more traditional values and less rosy economic hopes than those in the flourishing cities and suburbs. Gay and transgender issues, liberalised immigration laws, and climate change policies served to drive a wedge between the working class and the Democrats. Worse, during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats repeatedly opted to support Wall Street, not Main Street, enacting neo-liberal economic policies that enriched the already rich, shipped jobs overseas, and failed to fully fund public works that served the common good.
For example, Obama’s inability to fully fund necessary government operations is one of the reasons for the current problems with migration at the southern border: there is a lack of sufficient judges to hear asylum cases. And Democrats have failed to roll back the most egregious tax policies, such as treating management bonuses as a capital gain rather than income, enriching Wall Street stockbrokers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
ANOTHER DYNAMIC that has profoundly shaped the Catholic vote is the changing demographics of the Catholic Church itself. The acids of secularisation have emptied many churches and the only reason Catholics continue to constitute such a significant proportion of the national electorate is the influx of Hispanic immigrants, who are overwhelmingly Catholic. This, in turn, makes the Catholic vote vary wildly from state to state.
Ryan Burge, who teaches political science at Eastern Illinois University, publishes the Substack “Graphs about Religion” which focuses specifically on the role of religion in politics and culture. “The political composition of Catholics varies significantly based on region,” he explained to me. “For instance in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the share who are Democrats is 43 per cent, 43 per cent, and 45 per cent respectively. In Nevada it’s 50 per cent, and its 48 per cent in Arizona. That five-to-seven point gap between those regions can make all the difference on election day.”
Additionally, the “racial composition of Catholics is dramatically different in those states”, Burge notes. In Wisconsin, 86 per cent of Catholics are white, while in Michigan and Pennsylvania the percentages are 81 and 84 respectively. In Arizona, the percentage of Catholics who are white drops to 51 per cent and in Nevada it is 46. Latino Catholics who predominate in these south-west swing states are more likely to vote Democratic than are white Catholics, but Trump has made inroads among working-class Latinos too. In 2020,
Trump increased his share among Black and Latino working-class voters by 6 per cent and 18 per cent respectively, although some of that increase was likely due to the growing number of Latinos who have left the Catholic Church and now identify as evangelical Christians.
Many people decry the polarisation that has afflicted the nation, and has bled into the Church too, but no one is sure how to fix it, or what role the Churches can play in a renewal of healthy civic life. “Catholics best advance the common good when we resist partisanship and bring a distinctive voice to public life that puts the poor and vulnerable first,” says Daniels.
For Catholics, the “partisanship first” attitude has even come to shape ecclesiological views. “Much of the US opposition to Pope Francis overlaps with those who support Trump. Francis’ challenge on migration or environmental justice or poverty matters less than opposition to the Democratic Party and allegiance to Trump,” Daniels told me. “At the same time, some Catholic Democrats have been too willing to overlook the Biden administration’s embrace of extreme abortion policies. A test of our faith is whether we’re willing to challenge our allies when we believe they’re wrong.”
The last two elections were decided by vanishingly small margins. In 2016, more than 120 million people voted, and Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was a combined total of 77,774 votes. In 2020, Biden beat Trump in the popular vote nationwide by 7 million votes out of 156 million votes cast, but he only won key swing states by narrow margins: Arizona by 10,457 votes; Georgia by 11,779; and Wisconsin by 20,682. If Trump had won those three states, he would have secured his re-election.
WITH SUCH narrow margins, look for both campaigns to try any and every angle in reaching voters. Already, the Democratic National Committee has set up a group “Catholics Vote Common Good” that hosted a nationwide online meeting the night before Biden’s State of the Union address. A Republican organisation, Catholic Vote, has been busy trying to register new voters who will support Trump. Issues like support for Ukraine’s war effort could reverberate in the Ukrainian and Polish neighbourhoods of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Might Catholic teaching on the dignity of migrants make a difference among voters who live along the southern border? Will concern for the environment motivate young voters to come to the polls?
In these fraught times, the Catholic Church could be a source of stability and disinterested wisdom. Instead, the Church is as divided as the country. Oddly, strangely, this is precisely why Catholics will select who gets to live in the White House: they are evenly divided between the parties. 48 per cent of Catholics are most certainly going to support Biden and 48 per cent are going to back Trump. The middle 4 per cent will prove decisive, and their decision may have little to do with their faith.
Michael Sean Winters writes for The Tablet from the United States
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