Exit polls suggest President-Elect Donald Trump won the Catholic vote by a whopping 15 points, the largest margin in decades.
According to a Washington Post exit poll, Trump won the national Catholic vote Tuesday by 56 percent to 41 percent. Similarly, an NBC exit poll found that Catholic voters favored Trump in 10 key swing states by a 15-point margin, with 56 percent of the vote going to the former president and only 41 percent going to Harris.
While Trump and running mate J.D. Vance actively courted the Catholic vote, Vice President Kamala Harris seemed bent on alienating Catholics in every way possible, a tactic that served her poorly on election day.
In late October, Donald Trump declared that Kamala Harris had “lost the Catholic vote,” noting her dismal polling numbers among Catholics, a demographic that acts as a reliable bellwether of the election results.
As noted by one recent study, winning the Catholic vote, even by just a few percentage points, “is a reasonable indicator of who will win the American Presidency.”
This trend was evident in the past two elections. In 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump received 52 percent of the Catholic vote versus Hillary Clinton’s 42 percent, and he won the election. In 2020, President Joe Biden managed to receive 51 percent of the Catholic vote to Trump’s 47 percent and similarly took the day.
Kamala’s “persecution of the Catholic Church is unprecedented!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, underscoring her support of late-term abortion, “and even execution after birth,” which the majority of Americans oppose.
“Christians around the World will not be safe if Kamala Harris is President of the United States,” Trump said. “When I am President, I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing.”
For her part, former U.S. Ambassador Callista Gingrich had described Kamala Harris as “the anti-Catholic candidate.”
Harris’s snub of the Alfred E. Smith Catholic charity dinner in New York was the umpteenth show of her “disdain for Catholics,” Gingrich wrote.
Kamala “declined the invitation to attend the Al Smith Dinner, the first presidential candidate to do so since Walter Mondale in 1984,” Gingrich noted. “Instead, she sent in a pre-recorded video message.”
Anti-Catholic choices are nothing new for Kamala, and with each passing day, “more Americans are reminded of Harris’s abysmal record targeting Catholics as California’s Attorney General and U.S. Senator, and as Vice President of the United States,” Gingrich said.
As senator, Harris’s anti-Catholic animus was on full display when she grilled Catholic judicial nominees about their faith, implying that affiliation with the Knight of Columbus – a Catholic charitable organization that included JFK among its members – was grounds for disqualification.
As CatholicVote.org president Brian Burch said on Trump’s Victory, “Catholic voters played a decisive role in the historic victory of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, with some exit polls suggesting Trump defeated Harris among Catholics by a 14 point margin.”
“These numbers are shocking,” he continued, “and could prove to be the largest margin among Catholics in a presidential race in decades. Catholics proved again to be a critical voting bloc that cannot be ignored.”
Burch said that 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.
Further, Trump and Harris “differed sharply over the role of religion in America,” he said, with Harris “sealing her fate by telling Christians they didn’t belong at her rallies, before declaring there would be no accommodations for people of faith on abortion.”
“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,” he added.