Historic Catholic vote ‘delivered election to President Trump’, says CatholicVote president

CatholicVote.org President Brian Burch believes Catholics turning out for President-elect Trump was the reason he secured his second term in the White House.

Burch spoke to Fox News Digital this week about the massive swing of Catholics voting for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, helping the GOP candidate earn a decisive victory. According to The Washington Post, it was the largest winning margin among Catholics for any candidate since the dawn of exit polling in 1972.

"The Catholic vote is a large, multi-ethnic, working-class party made up of White voters and Hispanic voters and union voters," Burch said. "And I think you could make the case that it was Catholics that delivered this election to President Trump."

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Burch, whose organization made its first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate with Trump this year, broke down just how significant the demographic’s major shift was.

"Joe Biden won it by about two points in 2020. And depending on which exit poll you look at, it was as high as 18 points in 2024 for Donald Trump winning the Catholic vote," he said to Fox News Digital. 

NBC exit polls showed that 58 percent of U.S. Catholics voted for Trump, while only 40 percent voted for Harris. Biden, who beat Trump in 2020 and will now be replaced by him, was the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy.

As one opinion column in Newsweek by Brian Kaylor recognized, "Among religious voters, the key group that helped reverse Trump's fortunes were Catholics."

"Harris cracking just 40 percent of Catholics as Trump ran up to 58 percent is a huge loss, especially in states with large Catholic populations like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Harris fell not only among White Catholics but all Catholics, which is probably tied to her losses among Latino men," Kaylor added. 

"So, you saw about an 18-to-22-point swing in the Catholic vote," Burch told Fox News Digital, calling it a shift that "our elected leaders need to be paying attention to."

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Burch said Catholic voters broke for Trump over Harris due to Trump’s appeal to kitchen table issues and promise to enact "anti-woke" policies.

"They liked what they heard from President Trump," he said. "They liked his attention being paid to record inflation, to the problems at the border, to kind of this anti-woke, let's go back to normal, let's go back to an era in this country where we were proud to be Americans – where boys weren't hanging out in girls' locker rooms, where we didn't have this DEI craziness in our military."

"I think Catholics finally said, you know, I think it’s time to take a look at the Republican Party," he added.

Burch did acknowledge that Trump "did not run a perfect campaign" regarding pro-life issues – opting to leave abortion rights to be decided by U.S. states rather than push for outlawing the procedure that the Catholic Church teaches is a grave moral evil. Still, he said that Trump’s record of overturning Roe v. Wade – Trump's three Supreme Court picks voted in favor of the Dobbs decision – and not embracing abortion was preferable to Harris’ platform. 

He said, "Kamala Harris, on the other hand, of course, wanted to impose a radical extreme abortion policy on the entire country and explicitly said there would be no accommodations for people of faith. Zero. She would force us to violate our conscience, which would mean the end of Catholic health care in America, for example."

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Burch added that "Harris had a clear record of hostility to Catholics," throughout her political career and detailed how that attitude manifested itself during her presidential campaign. 

"Now, then she runs for president, and she had a chance to reach out, to extend some kind of compromise, some kind of a gesture even, and she couldn't even do that. She snubbed the Al Smith dinner," he said, mentioning Harris’ notable absence from the famous dinner put on by New York archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Catholic Charities ahead of the presidential election.

"We're still a Christian country made up of all sorts of people of faith. And she just didn't seem to get that. And I think that was what played a big role in people's decision to go with Trump," he said.

The vice president's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. 

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