For Trump, a Historic Victory Among Catholic Voters
The former president won the Catholic vote by a larger margin than any presidential candidate in more than a half-century.
This story has been updated.
By Gary Gately
Donald John Trump mounted one of the most astounding political comebacks in U.S. history, and Catholics played a pivotal role.
Trump, the 78-year-old former president, won the Catholic vote by the largest margin of any presidential candidate in more than a half-century, according to exit polls.
That’s despite his major differences with Church teachings on immigration as well as other issues, including the environment and the death penalty. The president-elect captured 59% of the nationwide Catholic vote to 39% for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to exit polls by The Washington Post and CNN. An NBC News poll of voters in 10 key states found that Trump carried the Catholic vote by 58%-40%.
By contrast, President Joe Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president, won 52% of the Catholic vote in 2020 compared with 47% for Trump, according to Washington Post and Edison exit polls.
Trump’s showing among Catholics in the 2024 election far outperformed pre-election polls.
His election drew praise from conservative Catholic organizations and pro-lifers, while more progressive Catholic groups, LGBTQ Catholics and immigration advocates expressed dismay and anxiety.
Some suggested that Trump’s record — including being found liable of sexual abuse, his 34 felony convictions, his role in fomenting the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and his repeated racist, anti-immigrant and threatening comments — made him anything but the ideal choice of a president for Christians.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the group Catholic Democrats called the results “both hard to believe and deeply disappointing,” adding: “Please join us to pray for President-elect #DonaldTrump, #VPHarris, and indeed for our entire nation — especially for our sisters and brothers in whom the outcome of this #Election2024 will evoke feelings of fear, anxiety, profound disappointment and a range of other challenging negative emotions.”
The Vatican urged Trump to treat undocumented immigrants in a “humane” manner without resorting to the “extremes” of militarized mass deportations of more than 11 million of them that Trump has promised. U.S. bishops echoed that sentiment.
Trump’s margin of victory among Catholic voters, who comprised 22% of voters this election, represents the largest winning margin among Catholics for any presidential candidate since exit polling began in 1972, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Catholic vote for Trump, a nondenominational evangelical Christian, even exceeds Ronald Reagan’s 12–point margin among Catholic voters over Walter Mondale in 1984.
Even more White Catholics, 60%, broke for Trump, and his 46% support among Hispanic voters — most of them Catholic or evangelical — represents the highest for a Republican presidential candidate since 1980.
CatholicVote, a conservative political organization that spent more than $10 million on anti-Harris ads and voter outreach aimed at defeating her, said in an X post: “Catholic voters played a decisive role in the historic victory of Donald Trump and [running mate] JD Vance. Catholics proved again to be a critical voting bloc that cannot be ignored. Trump and Vance won Catholics by a massive margin by promising to improve the lives of those most impacted by inflation, and by promising to bring about a humane and orderly solution to the chaos at the border.”
The group added: “Harris exposed the fact that the Democratic Party has a big Catholic problem, with the Republican realignment now incorporating Hispanics, union members, and working-class voters that had reliably voted for Democrats in the past. Catholics are increasingly attracted by the agenda of the new right, popularized by Trump, which combines family-first social policies with America-first economic priorities.”
In the weeks leading to Election Day, Trump and Vance, the Ohio senator who will become the nation’s second Catholic vice president (following Biden), had repeatedly sought to court Catholic voters and often attacked Harris, a Baptist, as anti-Catholic.
In an op-ed last month in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, warned of Harris’ “prejudice against Catholics.” Among other things, he faulted the vice president for refusing to support faith-based exceptions for health providers who object to performing abortions and her cosponsoring as a senator in 2018 the “Do No Harm Act.” The measure, which failed to make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, would have forced Catholic healthcare providers to perform abortions and transgender surgeries, or lose their license and face federal discrimination lawsuits.
Trump perplexed some Catholics when he took to social media in September to post prayers to St. Michael the Archangel on his feast day and an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe with the words “Happy Birthday Mary!” on the day Catholics celebrate the Nativity of Mary. Both posts quickly attracted tens of millions of views.
Also in September, the Trump campaign launched Catholics for Trump in a bid to reach Catholic voters. On its website, the group describes itself as “a coalition committed to safeguarding the vital principles of religious liberty and defending family values that President Donald J. Trump has ardently championed.”
Trump also criticized Harris for becoming the first presidential candidate in four decades to not attend in person the October 17 Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, which raises funds for Catholic charities and is named after the late Catholic governor of New York and 1928 presidential candidate.
“It's sad, but not surprising, that Kamala has decided not to attend. I don't know what she has against our Catholic friends, but it must be a lot, because she certainly hasn't been very nice to them, in fact, Catholics are literally being persecuted by this Administration,” Trump said in a social media post after Harris sent a video instead of attending the Smith dinner.
But Trump pounced on the border crisis more than any other issue, warning of a foreign “invasion” by undocumented immigrants and repeatedly saying he would begin deporting more than 11 million of them immediately upon taking office. He has also pledged to complete the border wall, deploy thousands of troops to the southern border to prevent entry of undocumented immigrants and sharply restrict legal immigration.
Trump has regularly played to fears of immigrant crime. He has claimed, for example, that more than 13,000 convicted murderers entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration. Statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, however, show that the figure spans four decades, including under the Trump administration, and includes those now incarcerated.
Trump has also asserted — falsely — that millions of immigrants came to the U.S. illegally from jails, prisons and mental institutions.
Speaking of Trump’s stated immigration plans, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, told reporters Thursday: “We are for a wise policy towards immigrants and therefore one that does not go to these extremes. I think this is the only way to deal with the problem and to solve it in a humane way.”
Parolin, speaking on the sidelines of a conference at Pontifical University in Rome, added that Pope Francis and the Vatican have been “very precise, very clear” in articulating the Catholic Church’s stance.
The 87-year-old Jesuit pontiff has minced no words in expressing his views of what he portrays as Trump’s anti-immigrant stance.
In September, Francis said Americans would face choosing “the lesser evil” in the presidential election between Trump and Harris, whom the pope criticized for her strong pro-choice views. “Both are against life: the one who throws out migrants and the one who kills children,” Francis said.
And in one of his strongest calls yet for the moral imperative to welcome desperate migrants across the globe, Francis said in August: “There are those who work systematically and with every means possible to repel migrants. And this, when done with awareness and responsibility, is a grave sin. Let us not forget what the Bible says: ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a foreigner.’ The orphan, the widow and the stranger are the quintessential poor whom God always defends and asks to be defended.”
Meanwhile, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, posted a prayer for migrants on X: “Mary, Solace of Migrants, intercede for families who are fleeing from persecution, famine or pestilence in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Fill our hearts with compassion and inspire us to share generously with all our sisters and brothers in need.”
Immigration advocates also sounded the alarm over Trump’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants, most of whom live in households with legal immigrants.
Jesuit Relief Services/USA, which assists refugees and other forcibly displaced people, said in a statement: “How we respond to the tens of millions of people forced to flee their homes is a serious moral, legal, diplomatic, and economic question that impacts all of us. As an organization of people expressing our Catholic faith through our work, JRS/USA believes that to welcome, accompany, serve, and advocate for displaced people is an obligation.”
The organization said it “urges the incoming administration to honor the United States’ historic role as a proud nation of immigrants and echoes the longstanding call by U.S. bishops to reject the anti-immigrant stance that has become popular in different parts of our country, and the nativism, ethnocentricity, and racism that continue to reassert themselves in our communities.”
Mass deportations of more than 11 million undocumented immigrants would amount to “the largest law enforcement operation in world history” and would cost at least $315 billion, according to the American Immigration Council (AIC).
An early October report from the council concluded that the mass deportations would also devastate industries that rely on undocumented immigrants, including construction, agriculture and the hospitality sector, and exacerbate U.S. labor shortages. At the same time, the report said, as industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs.
“Should any president choose to pursue mass deportation, it would come at an extraordinary cost to the government while also devastating the economy,” AIC Executive Director Jeremy Robbins said. “It’s critical that policymakers and the American public understand what this would involve tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, already-strained industries devastated, millions of people locked up in detention and thousands of families torn apart, causing widespread terror and chaos in communities across the country.”
But Trump’s deportation vow appears to have resonated with those who voted for him: Washington Post exit polling found that 87% of Trump voters believe that most undocumented immigrants should be deported to the countries they came from while just 11% said they should be offered a chance to apply for legal status. Among Harris voters, 75% said most undocumented immigrants should get the chance to apply for legal status, while 22% said they should be deported.
Overall, however, voters ranked the economy and jobs the top issue (39%), followed by immigration (20%) and abortion at just 11%, an Associated Press exit survey of more than 120,000 voters found. On abortion, the AP survey found that 61% of Catholic voters said it should be legal in all or most cases, in line with previous polls, despite the Church’s teaching that abortion is a grave sin and U.S. bishops calling abortion a “preeminent concern” in a voters’ guide.
The AP poll also found that 38% of Catholic voters believed abortion should be illegal in some or all cases and split nearly evenly on whether it should be legal after 15 weeks.
Harris had made abortion rights a central theme of her campaign, while Trump has said abortion policy should be left to the states, not the federal government, to decide. But he has pointed out that he appointed three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who were in the majority in the high court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which had established a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly a half-century.
Abortion opponents hailed Trump’s victory and expressed hope that his administration would further restrict abortion, which Pope Francis has called “murder.”
“Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion lobby Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “President Trump’s first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term. In the long term, GOP pro-life resolve must be strengthened and centered on the unalienable right to life for unborn children.”
Trump and Vance had cast Harris as an “abortion extremist” who would allow abortions through birth, a false claim.
But Cristina Traina, a professor of Christian theology and ethics at Fordham University, told The Catholic Observer that Trump’s success in attracting Catholic voters likely turned mostly on concerns about the economy and inflation, not Church teachings.
She also said the extraordinary Catholic support for Trump demonstrates that many Catholics have firmly broken with their historical allegiance to Democratic candidates.
“They are no longer nearly as much of the bloc they used to be, when you could assume Catholics would vote Democrat,” Traina said. “Now Catholics are voting more along the lines of those who are philosophically similar in their political views….
“We can say again, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’” she said, quoting James Carville’s famous line when he served as an advisor to Bill Clinton’s successful campaign for president in 1992. “Other issues do not affect people’s everyday life nearly as much if they're struggling to pay the bills. That’s because of insanely high prices for housing, food and gas.”
Indeed, exit polls showed widespread concerns about the economy among voters. Two-thirds rated it as “poor” or “not so good,” according to the Washington Post polling.
Trump and Vance also both vehemently opposed transgender rights in the closing days of their campaign, which joined PACs in spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising attacking Harris for her previous statements supporting transgender rights. One spot noted Harris’ expressing support during her 2019 presidential campaign for taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” the narrator says.
At his October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Trump stoked fears among his followers about schools teaching about gender ideology and trans athletes participating in sports, saying: “We will get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.”
Some Democrats reportedly blamed Harris’ loss in part on Democrats’ support of transgender rights.
A Gallup poll in June found that 51% of Americans think changing one’s gender is morally wrong, while 44% say it is morally acceptable. In a 2023 Gallup poll, 69% said transgender athletes should be allowed to compete only on sports teams that conform with their birth gender, and only 26% endorsed transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity.
Pope Francis has made outreach to LGBTQ Catholics a hallmark of his 11-year papacy and often met with them. But in April, the Vatican condemned gender theory, or the idea that one’s gender can be changed, and sex-change surgery as “grave threats” to human dignity.
With Trump’s election, many LGBTQ people fear they’ll be targeted, advocates say.
Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, journalist and advocate for LGBTQ Catholics, wrote in the online publication Outreach that after Trump’s victory, he received nonstop messages from LGBTQ people.
“In essence people wrote a variation of three things: I feel so afraid today. I’m feeling really hopeless. And worst of all: I’m almost suicidal today,” Martin wrote.
“The tenor of the campaign run by Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance — dark, negative and nihilistic, with an undercurrent of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ — frightened many LGBTQ people. And LGBTQ people fear that they are the ‘them.’ A few days ago, one gay man told me that if the Trump/Vance ticket prevailed, it would be like the bullies who tormented him on the school playgrounds had won.”
After Trump’s victory, U.S. bishops called for prayers and unity.
“As Christians, and as Americans, we have the duty to treat each other with charity, respect, and civility, even if we may disagree on how to carry out matters of public policy,” Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said in a statement. “As a nation blessed with many gifts we must also be concerned for those outside our borders and eager to offer assistance to all.”
Broglio added: “Let us pray for President-elect Trump, as well as all leaders in public life, that they may rise to meet the responsibilities entrusted to them as they serve our country and those whom they represent. Let us ask for the intercession of our Blessed Mother, the patroness of our nation, that she guide to uphold the common good of all and promote the dignity of the human person, especially the most vulnerable among us, including the unborn, the poor, the stranger, the elderly and infirm, and migrants.”
And Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, said in a statement: “It is vitally important for each of us to remember that, as people of faith and goodwill, we are called to work together to seek truth, justice, and peace in our homes, in our communities, and in our nation….
“Some people today are breathing a sigh of relief at the outcome of our national, state and local elections, even as others are experiencing anxiety about our future,” Gregory added. “Our path forward lies in our respect for one another and in the God-given dignity we share, offered freely with prayer, patience, kindness, and hope.”
Amen.