The Myth of the White Catholic Democrat

The GOP has had an advantage with white Catholics for decades

The White Catholic vote may be one of the most consequential voting blocs in the modern political landscape. There are a couple of reasons that I believe this to be true.

1. There are still lots of them. My best guess is that they are at least 18% of the adult population.

2. They are geographically disbursed. It’s not like they are LDS, who are basically isolated to Utah and a few surrounding states. There are Catholics in significant numbers in almost every part of the United States. Which means they impact the outcome in presidential elections in both Michigan and Florida.

3. They tend to be older, have decent incomes and solid educational attainment. All of that is a recipe for higher voter turnout in elections. Especially in presidential elections.

4. They are not politically unified. There are lots of evangelicals - they are 80% Republicans. There are a fair number of atheists and agnostics, they are 75% Democrats. What this post will illustrate is that white Catholic Republicans outnumber Democrats, but it’s not by a wide margin.

You put all those pieces together and you get a group that can help one party win (or lose) the White House.

So, I wanted to do a deeper dive into the politics of white Catholics with an especially careful look at how they vote on election day to get a sense of where they will shake out in November of 2024.

I would guess that when most people think about the politics of white Catholics, they are drawn to images of John F. Kennedy and the strong support he enjoyed from his Catholic base, especially in places like the Northeast. And, that was generally true. Data from the General Social Survey conducted in the 1970s reports a white Catholic vote that leans heavily toward the Democrats.

In 1972, two-thirds of all white Catholics were Democrats. In comparison, just 21% of white Catholics were Republicans. For every white Catholic Republican, there were three Democrats. That’s the Kennedy coalition that I think most people conjure up. But that mix of Republicans and Democrats just didn’t last that long.

In fact, by the time George H.W. Bush ran for the presidency in 1988, the share of white Catholics who were Democrats had dropped below 50% and Republicans were 40% at that point. By the time Obama squared off with McCain in 2008, only about 37% of white Catholics were Democrats.

In the most recent data available from the GSS, the average white Catholic is much more likely to align with the GOP compared to the Democrats (44% vs 36%). And, 20% say that they are politically independent. But, as will become apparent in a minute, a huge portion of independent white Catholics vote for the Republicans at the ballot box.

But let’s pivot to that vote choice question mentioned earlier. I took the American National Election (which I hate, by the way) and calculated the two party vote for white Catholics in every election for which they have data - that goes back to the famous Kennedy election. A much different portrait emerges of the voting behavior of white Catholics. It’s really quite startling.

What is not surprising is that 82% of white Catholics cast their ballot for JFK when he ran in 1960. Lyndon Johnson also did very well in 1964, gathering up 78% of the vote. But that was clearly the high water mark for Catholics and the Democratic party. By 1968, the Democratic share had slipped to 60% and has never broken that threshold since.

In 1972, the white Catholic vote had clearly flipped. Richard Nixon took a solid majority of the white Catholics (63%). It’s noteworthy, though, that the Republicans have never gotten to that level in subsequent elections. White Catholic voters did shift back to the Democrats during the Carter election but that was an aberration, not a trend.

Let’s just make this plain - in every election from 1980 through 2020 (that’s 11 in total), the Democrat got a clear majority of the white Catholic vote in just two of them - Clinton’s election in 1992 and his reelection in 1996. In 2004, the white Catholic vote was evenly divided but in the average election during this time period the GOP’s margin of support is usually about 8 points among white Catholics.

White Catholics lean toward the Republicans on election day. And, that’s not just a modern phenomenon. I would argue that after looking at this it would be fair to say that the White Catholic vote has been a point of strength for the GOP since 1972 (with a few minor exceptions).

But I wanted to check my work. So, here’s the white Catholic vote in the last four presidential elections, but this time the data comes from the Cooperative Election Study. The sample for the CES is huge, so this can give me some more confidence than the results from the ANES.

Yeah, pretty boring graph. White Catholics favor the Republicans and by fairly wide margins. It was 13 points in 2008, 16 points in 2012, 18 points in 2016 and 19 points in 2020. If anything, the data says that the white Catholic voter is becoming just a bit redder with each passing election. Also, the numbers from the CES aren’t that far off from those in the ANES, either. Which makes me feel even more confident in these results.

What about Mass attendance, though? Maybe it’s the low attenders that love the Republicans while the Democrats do better with the more engaged Catholics. Below is the two party vote share for the Republican among white Catholics but this is broken down into levels of Mass attendance in each of the last four election cycles.

Generally speaking, the less a white Catholic attends Mass the less likely they are to favor the Republicans. For instance, in 2020, Trump only earned 55% of never attending white Catholics. He enjoyed 73% of Catholics who went to church more than once a week. It’s also interesting to me that each successive level of attendance is just another stair step up in support for the GOP. There’s not a huge leap between any two levels of attendance.

It’s also worth pointing out that in most attendance categories, the last four elections have been remarkably consistent. For instance, the differences in vote share among weekly attending white Catholics is not statistically significant - it’s stuck right around two-thirds. The same is true for the weekly or more category.

However, there is some strong evidence that Trump managed to make inroads in two key groups of white Catholics - those who attended Mass seldom or never. McCain only got 47% of never attending white Catholics in 2008. Trump did eight points better in 2020. The increase among seldom attenders was eight percentage points. That’s where the gains have come for the Republicans - low attending white folks.

But how did this happen, exactly? White Catholics used to be 2/3 Democrats and they voted in overwhelming numbers for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Now, the Republican voters clearly outnumber the Democrats in the white Catholic church. Maybe it’s an age thing. Older white Catholics just slid to the right over time. I tested that using data from the GSS. I broke the data into birth cohorts and charted their ideology over time.

Yeah, there is some pretty strong evidence here among white Catholics in the top row (that’s those born between 1940 and 1959). The share who were liberal at the beginning of the survey in 1972 was clearly higher than it is in more recent waves of the GSS. In many cases the liberal share has dropped at least ten percentage points, while the conservative percentage has gained about the same share. Older white Catholics moved to the right over time.

Among the middle row of cohorts, it’s hard to really tell a big story beyond the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals. In fact, there’s no cohort I can find here where the liberals clearly are the largest group. So, I’m pretty sure what happened is older white Catholics moved away from the left side of the political spectrum and the younger generations just haven’t change that much. They fall on the center right and have for quite some time.

But here’s something that has been eating at me - how come only 44% of white Catholics are Republicans, yet Trump gets close to 60% support in 2020? Well, it has to be related to the fact that a lot of independent/moderate white Catholics cast their ballot for the GOP on election day. So, let’s check that. Here’s the two part vote for the Republican based on ideology and political partisanship for white Catholics in both 2008 and 2020.

Conservative Republicans vote for Republicans. That should come as no big surprise. And those numbers haven’t really changed over time. Okay - that makes some sense. But that’s not where Trump has managed to win people over. You can see how he shifted the electorate by looking at both liberals and independents.

Among white Catholics who identified as liberal independents, McCain only got 22% of the vote in 2008. Trump did much better at 41%. Look at liberal Republicans. McCain got just 66% of this vote in 2008. Trump drove that number up to 81%. Meanwhile, Trump did much worse among Democrats compared to McCain. He lost seven points among conservative Democrats and ten points among moderate Democrats.

If anything, Trump proves that partisanship is stronger than ideology. Trump lost big time support among white Democrats in 2020. But he made big gains among liberals, specifically. This is a weird faction, for sure, but it points toward the fact that knowing a white Catholics ideology and partisanship is not perfectly predictive of how they voted on election day.

I love writing posts like this, because it helps me understand something in a better way. I think I can say with some reasonable empirical certainty that the liberal Democrat white Catholic is pretty much a myth. White Catholics used to align pretty strongly with the Democrats, but that hasn’t been the case in the last four decades. White Catholics are right of center, politically. They favor Republicans over Democrats.

If anything, I think there’s evidence that the white Catholics will continue to coalesce around the GOP. Just a few weeks ago a really interesting report was published on Catholic clergy. Here’s the graph that really jumps out to me:

Here’s the choice quote:

The proportion of priests who identified as “somewhat progressive” or “very progressive” fell from almost 70% among those ordained in 1965-1969 to less than 5% among those ordained in 2020 or later.

The Catholic priesthood used to be primarily made up of left-leaning clergy. Now, they are completely extinct. The future of American Catholicism is more conservative than it was thirty years ago.

And with this data, it’s clear to me that the number of truly left of center white Christian churches will continue to dwindle. The mainline is in complete free fall, the Catholic Church has lurched hard to the right from the top down and obviously evangelicals aren’t softening their opinions on controversial positions. To be a white Christian is to be a Republican. Now more than ever.

Code for this post can be found here.