2024 Election Post-Mortem: Catholics

Spoiler alert - they are no longer a 50/50 voting bloc

I get asked to talk to the media here and there. It used to be something that made me a bit nervous but I learned this little trick that made things a lot easier - I would just memorize these little bite sized data nuggets that I could toss out when asked a question that would provide enough of a structure to my response that I could build around that. It’s not like I am conjuring up an answer to a question on the spot, instead it’s just recalling the results of a graph that I generated that stuck in my head for some reason.

The only problem with that approach is that I constantly have to update those little tidbits as the data begins to tell a different story about what is happening in American religion and politics. Let me give you a good example of that - “What’s up with Catholics and their voting patterns?” My go-to response would have been something along the lines of, “Well, America looks like Catholics and Catholics look like America.” I would prattle on about how the Catholic vote tends to be pretty close to 50/50 in most recent elections, however there was a bit of evidence that the white Catholic vote was trending to the right over time.

The data from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study is out and now I have an updated view of what actually happened with Catholics at the ballot box in November. Suffice to say that the old narratives just don’t apply anymore.

The first data point that needs to be emphasized is that Catholics are not a 50/50 voting bloc anymore. That was certainly true in the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016. The outcome never deviated by more than four percentage points, but those percentages began to tilt rightward in 2020 when it was Trump +5. But that may have just been a weird blip. However, once that result is seen in the light of the 2024 election, it’s clear to me now - the Catholic vote is clearly in the Republican column. Trump got 56% of their votes compared to only 42% for Harris. That fourteen point gap is nine points larger than the prior election.

How did Trump run up the score? Well, he continued to make big gains with white Catholics, there’s no doubt about that. The white Catholic vote has been majority Republican for quite a while. It was R+13 in 2008, and R+16 in 2012. But in 2016 that margin moved to nineteen points then twenty-one points in 2020. The results from 2024 indicate that Trump got 64% of the white Catholic vote and now the electoral gap is a chasm at 29 points.

Non-white Catholics had been relatively cool towards Trump in his two prior campaigns. Just 24% of them cast a ballot for the Republican in 2016 – a low point. But then a shift began to happen. Trump garnered 31% of the non-white Catholic vote in 2020 and narrowed the margin to D+37 when it was D+47 four years earlier. Just look at the 2024 result - Trump got 40% of the non-white Catholic vote, which is the largest share in the prior five elections and Harris only got 59%. Between 2016 and 2024, Trump gained seven points with white Catholics and sixteen points with non-white Catholics. That’s unbelievable.

What about attendance? Did he draw in a lot of cultural Catholics or did he run up the score with the really devout, weekly attenders?

I think the clearest finding here is that Trump has really made no inroads with Catholics who don’t attend Mass that much. He made zero numerical gains with Catholics who attend Mass seldom or never. Instead, the shift happened among the most active Catholics. For instance, between 2016 and 2024, Trump did six points better among weekly attenders and eight points better among Catholics who attended Mass multiple times per week.

But what does that look like broken down by race? Trump made big, big gains with white Catholics who attended Mass at least once a year. He gained 8 points among the yearly attenders, fourteen points among monthly attenders, nine points among weekly attenders, and a dozen points among white Catholics who were at Mass more than once a week. Think about this - 82% of that latter category voted for Trump in 2024. That’s near white evangelical levels.

You can also see big shifts among non-white Catholics, too. Again, it’s among the most religiously active. Among weekly attenders, just 24% voted for Trump in 2016. In 2024, that was up to 37% and he gained a whopping 18 points among non-white Catholics who attended Mass more than once a week.

But here’s a key point about Catholics - the vast majority of Catholics just don’t attend that much. In the 2024 data, over 40% attended less than once a year and only 27% indicated that they were weekly attenders. So making big gains among the most devout may not actually yield that many actual votes on election day. So, here’s where the Republican candidates' votes came from in terms of Catholics and their attendance.

When McCain ran in 2008, 40% of all his Catholic votes came from weekly attenders and that was true for Romney, too. Meanwhile the low attending Catholics were about 30% of their coalition. But look how that shifted during the Trump elections. In 2016, 2020, and 2024, only a third of all Catholic votes for Trump came from weekly attenders. Look at the most recent result - 37% of all Trump’s votes in 2024 came from Catholics who attended Mass seldom or never. In contrast only 33% were from weekly attenders.

What does it mean, practically speaking? It’s certainly not a bad thing that Trump made significant gains among weekly attending Catholics, but it didn’t actually result in a lot more raw votes. Instead, the fact that he has managed to hold serve with the cultural Catholics is a really big deal. Getting 50% of their votes in 2016 and 2024 actually yields more ballots because of the increasing number of low attending Catholics.

Okay, so now we know that Trump continues to make incremental gains with Catholics of all racial backgrounds and attendance levels but I wanted to poke around the ‘why’ question a bit at the end of this post. And, of course, abortion is a fine place to start. The 2024 CES asked a lot of new and interesting questions about the topic and I wanted to show you the Catholic responses to six of those.

A majority of Catholics are pro-choice in the most basic sense. Among white Catholics, 51% favor abortion as a choice and it’s two-thirds of non-white Catholics. But once you get into the weeds of abortion policy things tend to get a bit murkier. For instance, about 60% of Catholics believe that the Constitution does not provide a fundamental right to an abortion and the Catholic church is clearly evenly divided on the topic of whether women should be able to obtain abortion pills through the mail. It’s notable that a slim majority of white Catholics are in favor of a ban on this (52%) compared to only 45% of non-white Catholics.

But the clear impression I get from this data is that the share of Catholics who are truly pro-life is not that large. For instance, just 15% of Catholics believe that abortion should be made illegal in all circumstances. Additionally, less than a quarter of Catholics believe that it should be illegal for a woman to travel to a different state to seek out an abortion. And when asked if abortion access should be expanded by allowing more providers to offer the procedure, the Catholic view is pretty evenly divided, too.

But there’s no doubt in my mind that abortion was a key cleavage on election day. Here’s how I know that - I created an abortion support scale based on the prior six questions. A score of six would mean support for expanded abortion access while a score of zero would mean a consistent belief that abortion should be illegal and that any means to obtain one should be prohibited.

As you can clearly see - Donald Trump was the near unanimous choice among those who scored the lowest on this abortion access scale. He won at least 90% of those who scored a zero or a one. But as abortion support scores rose, Trump’s vote share began to fall. For Catholics who expressed a great deal of support for abortion services, the Republicans did very poorly in 2024. There’s no doubt that abortion is a primary cleavage in the Catholic electorate. But note the Catholic vote split on Trump support based on race, though. For instance, among those who were a 3 on this six point scale, 89% of white Catholics voted for the GOP compared to only 58% of non-white Catholics. There was a twenty point gap at the score of 2 or 4, too.

But here’s what you need to know about distribution of scores in the Catholic electorate. Just 30% of all Catholics in this sample scored a 0, 1, or 2. In contrast, nearly 40% of all Catholics were in the 5 or 6 buckets on support for abortion access. In other words, there just aren’t that many really pro-life Catholics in the electorate. In my estimation, the fact that Trump still managed majority support among those who scored a 3 or 4 on this scale is a big reason why he won in 2024.

However, at the end of the day, I really do think that Catholics were motivated to vote for Donald Trump for the same reasons as the rest of the electorate - economic concerns. I did a really simple calculation of Trump’s vote share among Catholics by household income over the last three election cycles.

You can see that Trump performed essentially the same among Catholic voters who made less than $70,000 per year as a household in the last three elections. His share was about 25-30% of the poorest Catholics but that ramped up to 45% among those making around $45,000 per year. But from that point, the estimates diverge quite a bit. You can see that the 2016 result is a clear outlier compared to the two more recent campaigns. Trump did not win majority support of Catholics who make over $100,000 per year in 2016.

However, in 2024 that was a group in which the Republicans did a whole lot better. Among Catholics making between $120K and $150K per year in 2016, about 48% of them voted for Donald Trump. In the 2024 contest, that was ten points higher. That’s a really consistent finding in these results, which does tell an interesting story about the inflation aspect of this last election cycle.

People at the bottom end of the economic spectrum tend to be hit hardest by inflation because they have less slack in their budget for groceries or gas. They were unmoved by this argument in 2024. Instead, it was the relatively well off Catholics who gravitated toward Trump in big numbers in 2024.

My priors have been updated. The Catholic vote is clearly a Republican vote now. Trump made big gains with white and non-white Catholics. If the Democrats want to have any chance at all going forward, they need to figure out how to fix this huge problem.

Code for this post can be found here.