A GOP leaning white Catholic voting bloc emerges from the 2024 election

 

Expert says Trump victory confirms white Catholics as GOP voting bloc

By John Lavenburg

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, left, with Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, right, at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Credit: Evan Vucci/AP.)

NEW YORK – While the exact breakdown of the Catholic vote in the 2024 election remains unclear, one expert notes that exit polling data that is available suggests that in future elections, white Catholics can be penciled in as a significant GOP voting bloc.

“White Catholics in every election cycle are becoming an increasingly stronger GOP voting bloc,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, told Crux. “I think now we can just assume that the Catholic vote is going to be 60-40, Republican vs. Democrat, and it might even go up from there as things change.”

Burge, who describes himself as a mainline Protestant, spoke with Crux on Nov. 6 after it became clear that former President Donald Trump had secured enough electoral college votes to win the election. So far, multiple exit polls show a significant advantage for Trump with the Catholic vote. NBC gives Trump a 60-37 advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris on that front, and CNN gives him a 56-41 advantage.

In addition to white Catholics, Burge highlighted the apparent shift among Hispanic voters. Nationwide, Trump performed better with Hispanic voters than he did in either 2020 or 2016, and Burge expects that trend to hold for Catholic Hispanic voters, as well.

“One of the things that we’re seeing is the Hispanic vote mattered a whole lot,” Burge said. “I think that they have always been seen as a moderate voting bloc, but voted for Democrats on election day, and I think we saw in 2024 that they’re still a moderate voting bloc, but they’re not necessarily Democratic all of the time.”

Another way to assess the conservative nature of the overall Catholic vote is to analyze the shift in the political leanings of priests over time. Burge said that if you look at survey data of Catholic priests who were ordained in the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll notice that they were evenly split between left, right, and center. That is no longer the case. He said survey data on priests who were ordained in the last ten years shows that they’re 80 percent conservative.

“It’s a purification thing that goes on, where we’re being politically purified by what’s coming from the pulpits and the pews in Protestant and Catholic Churches. To stick around means that you’re at least willing to listen to talking points from the other side of the aisle, which we know that people are less and less likely to do now,” Burge said.

“It’s hard to be challenged from the pulpit on the left or the right, and it looks like the Catholic Church is going to be almost exceedingly from the right in the decades to come,” added Burge, who is also the founder of Graphs about religion, a website that analyzes data regarding religion and politics.

The election also showed, he said, that abortion isn’t necessarily a top priority for Catholic voters. That reality is despite the fact that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops – both in their voting guide and bishops in individual statements – held it as the “pre-eminent priority” of the election.

“To me, that might be the long, lasting legacy of this 2024 election from a religion/politics standpoint,” Burge said. “There were a whole lot of people who walked in the ballot box in places like Florida, like Missouri, who voted for Donald Trump but then voted to enshrine abortion access in the constitution in their state, and so I think for a lot of people that is not a deal breaker.”

“I’ve been saying that over and over and over again with polling data,” he said. “If you look at white evangelicals, none of them say it’s a deal breaker, the issue of abortion.”

Burge said the simple fact of the election, and Trump’s victory when it comes to the Catholic vote, is that Catholics are all over the country and embrace every economic class. Therefore, he said, like non-Catholics, the economy was clearly a top priority for Catholic voters, and that was going to be the case regardless of statements from any local, national or even global Catholic leader, including Pope Francis.

“I think we realize we all live in bubbles, and I think the average Catholic does not hear [Pope Francis] speak on almost anything in an average year. … I think the average Catholic is not taking their guidance from their priest or their pastor, or their bishop, or a cardinal or the pope,” Burge said.

“I think at the end of the day, they vote based on their pocketbook and decide if they’re doing better or worse than they were doing four years ago, and I think a lot of them think they’re doing worse financially,” he said.

How Catholic converts may reshape Republican Party politics, i.e., J.D. Vance

 

Catholic Converts Like JD Vance Are Reshaping Republican Politics

Photo illustration by The New York Times; source photograph by Emily Elconin/Getty Images

By Matthew Schmitz

Despite institutional decline and internal conflict, Catholicism retains a surprising resonance in American life — especially in certain elite circles. It has emerged as the largest and perhaps the most vibrant religious group at many top universities. It claims six of the nine Supreme Court justices as adherents. It continues to win high-profile converts, and its social teaching exerts an influence (often unacknowledged) on public debates, inspiring political thinkers who seek to challenge both the cultural left and the laissez-faire right.

The Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism after attending Yale Law School, exemplifies this phenomenon. When he was baptized into the church in 2019, he joined an influential group of conservative converts, including the legal scholars Erika Bachiochi and Adrian Vermeule, the political scientist Darel Paul, the Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the theologian R.R. Reno and the writer and editor Sohrab Ahmari, one of my colleagues at the online magazine Compact. (I am also a convert to Catholicism, and I work or have worked with many of these figures.)

Such thinkers disagree, sometimes sharply, on important matters, not least the value of populism and the merits of Donald Trump. But all share a combination of social conservatism and a willingness to question many of the free-market orthodoxies of the pre-Trump Republican Party. In doing so, they can claim justification from Catholic social teaching, a body of thought that insists on a traditional understanding of the family while embracing a living wage and trade unions as means of promoting “the common good.” See, for example, Mr. Vance in 2019: “My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching.”

This group’s economic thinking distinguishes its members from an earlier cohort of conservative Catholic intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Michael Novak. Those men laid a stress on free markets, in part because the threat of Soviet Communism had led Catholic thinkers to emphasize the relative virtues of a liberal and capitalist system that had long been subject to Catholic critique.

By contrast, for Mr. Vance and others like him, Catholicism seems to be a resource for pushing back against the excesses of cultural and economic liberalism. As for so many converts before them, the church represents an alternative to the dominant ethos of the age. During the Romantic period, intellectuals like Chateaubriand and Friedrich Schlegel were drawn to Catholicism in reaction to what they saw as a tidal wave of rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, the writer Evelyn Waugh, another convert, described Catholicism as a welcome foil for what he saw as the “materialistic, mechanized state.”

Many of today’s converts look to resist the left-right fusion of libertarian cultural attitudes and free-market economics that has reshaped Western society over the past three or four decades. But rather than precipitating a radical overhaul of society, as some fear and others hope, they have exerted a subtler influence that is nonetheless significant: altering how the Republican Party approaches policy, and in some cases helping build a new consensus across party lines.

To get a sense of what this looks like in practice, consider the recent reorientation of U.S. trade policy. Robert Lighthizer, the trade chief for Mr. Trump, championed tariff policies against China and the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement. Mr. Lighthizer has described his approach as an attempt to promote “common good economics” by abandoning “the orthodoxies of free trade religion.”

Citing Pope Leo XIII, who inaugurated Catholic social teaching in the late 19th century, Mr. Lighthizer has argued for the importance of meaningful work in promoting healthy families, neighborhoods and communities. Notably, the tariffs on Chinese goods championed by Mr. Lighthizer have been continued, and even augmented, by his replacement under President Biden, Katherine Tai.

Catholic thought also appears to have played a role in the right’s recent tentative opening to labor unions. When the United Auto Workers went on strike last year, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri cosponsored a supportive resolution with various Democrats, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In an article urging conservatives to back the union, Mr. Hawley cited Pope Leo XIII’s 1901 encyclical on Christian democracy. In 2019, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida referenced the Catholic Church’s teaching in an argument for “the essential role of labor unions.”

Mr. Vance, who visited a U.A.W. picket line last year, told me in an interview in February that he is “very much aware of what Leo XIII wrote about the relationship between business and labor.” At the Republican National Convention last month, a speech by Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, was a sign that such sympathies have been noticed by labor leaders.

To be sure, no trade policy or set of labor laws is specifically Catholic. Nor is the general ideological tendency to fuse social conservatism with calls for economic solidarity. Mr. Hawley, for example, is a Protestant who draws inspiration from the Dutch Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper. Jewish thinkers such as the British scholar and politician Maurice Glasman have also been important in developing this set of ideas. Indeed, Catholic scholars have stressed to me that the church’s social teaching doesn’t narrowly dictate policy.

One sign of just how intensely Catholics can disagree over social issues is the recent controversy over Mr. Vance’s stance on abortion. When he said on “Meet the Press” last month that mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion, should remain accessible, some Catholics worried that his comment represented a retreat from the pro-life position.

Others came to his defense. Sherif Girgis, a Catholic legal scholar at the University of Notre Dame who attended law school with Mr. Vance, reminded me that Mr. Vance has spoken in the past “about allowing some abortions as a matter of political reality, not moral legitimacy.” If that’s what Mr. Vance meant here, Mr. Girgis said, “then he’s not contradicting any general Catholic moral principle.”

But thinkers like Mr. Vance who seek to draw on Catholic social teaching today face a more basic difficulty than any specific disagreement about how to apply it. When Catholic social teaching was at the height of its influence, in the first half of the 20th century, there was an impressive array of Catholic institutions that could help carry out that vision: Catholic states, Catholic trade unions, Catholic youth groups and more. Now, those institutions have disappeared or persist only in diminished form.

In the absence of a robust Catholic culture, Catholic social teaching can seem strangely weak — like a voice raised in an empty field rather than before a full house. It may still inspire influential actors like Mr. Vance, but they will be constrained by an unchurched public’s limited appetite for Catholic ideas.

Indeed, many worry that the church itself has lost the will to resist the grimmest aspects of modern society. Some have warned that efforts to adjust the church’s sexual teaching to contemporary mores are only the latest expression of what Henri de Lubac, the Jesuit theologian, called “an endeavor that wants to dissolve the church into the world.”

Such challenges, along with recurring instances of scandal and hypocrisy, should be enough to cure even the most enthusiastic Catholic convert of triumphalism. Yet those inclined to faith may still marvel that such an imperfect institution continues to attract those like Mr. Vance who seek an alternative to much of contemporary society, and to offer intimations of how it might be improved.

Republicans still claim to be Pro-Life despite yanking the right to life plank from the party platform

 

Republicans remove ‘right to life’ plank from party platform

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, praised the platform, saying it demonstrates that the Republican Party “remains strongly pro-life at the national level.” | Credit: Screenshot/EWTN News in Dept

By Peter Pinedo

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 8, 2024 / 16:50 pm

The 2024 Republican National Convention’s platform committee voted on Monday to adopt new language regarding abortion, removing a “right to life” plank and a call for a national law protecting unborn life from the party platform.

The platform is an aspirational document that is drafted and approved by party delegates during election years. It is meant to outline the party’s policy goals for the coming years.

While previous versions of the document said that unborn children have a “fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” and called for a constitutional amendment to guarantee that right, this year’s platform uses much more moderate language and emphasizes the role of states in protecting life.

It reads: “We proudly stand for families and life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.”

The platform goes on to laud the overturn of Roe v. Wade and then express support for prenatal care, birth control, and in vitro fertilization (IVF).

“After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people. We will oppose late-term abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF,” the new document reads.  

The draft, which according to the Washington Post was approved in an 84-18 vote, was written by former President Donald Trump’s campaign and adopted at his urging. 

The Trump campaign celebrated the platform’s passage in a Monday statement in which they said it “articulates his [Trump’s] vision to Make America Great Again in a way that is concise and digestible for every voter.”

Since April, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee has consistently signaled his desire to keep abortion exclusively a state issue. During a televised debate last month with President Joe Biden, he asserted that the 2021 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe v. Wade means that abortion is now up to the states.

Leading pro-life Republicans have echoed this sentiment, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio saying in a Sunday CNN interview that “our platform has to reflect our nominee and our nominee’s position actually happens to be one grounded in reality … His position on this has been the reality that you can’t pass a federal law [protecting unborn life] even if we wanted to.”

The reaction from the pro-life community, meanwhile, was mixed.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, praised the platform, saying it demonstrates that the Republican Party “remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”

Kristi Hamrick, a representative for Students for Life Action, told CNA that while “not perfect” the platform represents “two very big wins” for the pro-life movement: acknowledging that the 14th Amendment protects all life, including unborn life, and condemning late-term abortion.

Hamrick said that she has been working with the Trump campaign and delegates to the Republican National Convention to stress the importance of the Republican Party prioritizing the protection of unborn life.

Even with a reduced legislative focus, Hamrick said there is a lot of important work a future Trump administration could do for the pro-life movement including reversing “a lot of weaponized federal policy” that she said is “prejudiced in favor of abortion.”

“If we detangled and cut out the cancer of abortion and abortion-related programming from our federal budgets, we can have a healthier budget and a life-affirming budget.” If Republicans were to achieve those wins under a Trump administration, Hamrick said it would constitute “a very vibrant and vigorous term.”