Donald Trump may or may not have won the Catholic vote in 2016 – polling analysts are surprisingly divided over the question. They are divided too over whether there really is such a thing as the Catholic vote. There are certainly millions of Catholic voters, however: one out of every five Americans is Catholic. Trump’s success in 2020, or the success of his eventual Democratic opponent, will depend in great part on those voters.
But while Democrats have a clear-cut strategy for appealing to Catholics, namely by focusing on the burgeoning ranks of recent Catholic immigrants, Trump and the Republican Party he has remade appear at first glance a hard sell to those in communion with Rome. He has appointed judges and justices who appear to be inclined to uphold an originalist understanding of the Constitution, which may lead to the overturning of Roe v Wade if the Supreme Court ever has occasion to revisit its reasoning. Yet Trump is far from a social conservative’s ideal, and Catholic conservatives in particular may wonder whether Trump’s vision for the Republican Party is both good and feasible.
To understand Trump and Catholic politics, however, it is first necessary to look at what Catholic politics is and isn’t in the United States. When John F Kennedy became America’s first Catholic president nearly 60 years ago, Catholics and non-Catholics alike thought the occasion momentous. America was a Protestant-majority country, and a vocal minority of bigots and secularists warned that the nation would be subverted by a leader faithful to Rome. They were disappointed – Kennedy proved not to be a Catholic president, but just another American president.
In the decades since Kennedy’s tragically foreshortened administration, there have been Catholic speakers of the House of Representatives. There has been a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court since 2006. And while there has never again been a Catholic president, there have been countless Catholics in high executive branch positions. Yet none of this has made American government noticeably Catholic in any sense.
Even on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, where Church teachings are abundantly clear, Catholics in politics do not stand out a bloc. Republican Catholics tend to line up with the Republican Party, and Catholic Democrats are for the most part hardly distinguishable from other Democrats. Indeed, the most notable exceptions – such as pro-life Democrats Thomas Eagleton, Sargent Shriver, and Robert Casey Sr – prove the rule. Instead of representing a distinct Catholic brand of Democrat or American politician more generally, Eagleton, Shriver and Casey reflected the fact that Republicans and Democrats had not yet become ideologically divided on abortion when the three of them entered politics.
Catholic politicians, in short, are almost perfectly assimilated to their parties, and to their parties’ respective ideologies, regardless of how well those parties or ideologies line up with the teachings or counsels of the Catholic Church. And what is true of Catholic politicians is true of Catholic voters as well: during presidential elections, they vote almost identically with the rest of the country as a whole, which has led many pollsters and analysts to say that there is no “Catholic vote” at the national level. The Catholic vote is the same as the general non-Catholic vote. Those Catholics who attend Mass most faithfully are more likely to vote Republican – but this too tracks a more general trend in which voters who attend religious services most often are most likely to favour the GOP. Catholics who attend Mass regularly do not vote as overwhelmingly for the Republicans as Evangelicals who attend services equally as often, but they are more Republican in their voting than mainline Protestants who attend services as often. Catholics are the middle.
Yet this has not always been the case, and it may not remain so for much longer. The Catholic vote has historically been in part an ethnic vote and an immigrant vote, and there was indeed a time when Americans of Irish and Italian descent favoured the Democratic Party. In the 2016 election, there was an apparent division between older white Catholic voters and younger Hispanic Catholic voters – though psephologists have been debating since the election just how the white Catholic vote, variously defined, really broke down between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Young non-whites of all faiths (and, increasingly, none) are more likely to be Democrats. For now, however, Pew polling indicates that Catholics are divided equally between the parties, with 47 per cent identifying as or leaning toward the Democrats and 46 per cent identifying as or leaning toward the GOP.
Democrats hope that immigration will tip that balance in their favour. Conservatives, both Catholic and not, have long tried to use ideology as a check upon the liberal, Democratic tide: if only Catholics and Evangelicals can be amalgamated, the theory goes, fused together through a shared cultural conservatism, then Republicans – and the right sort of conservative Republicans, at that – will prevail at the ballot box. To the extent Catholics are faithful, an ecumenical religious conservatism will make them Republican. And more and more Catholics will be driven to the right by the hubris of secular liberals, conservatives imagine.
In effect, the left and the right court Catholics through different appeals to the idea of a “faith community” – conservatives emphasise the “faith” in cultural, doctrinal and sometimes even legalistic terms, while progressives emphasise the “community”, through the experience of Catholics as ethnic minorities and immigrants. Neither side is particularly good at using the other’s mode of appeal. Democrats are prevented from making a faith-based pitched to Catholic voters because the party’s ideological liberalism is at stark variance from Church teachings on life, family and sexuality. Christian conservatives have often wanted Republicans to make greater efforts to win ethnic minorities and immigrants, but the lacklustre results of the GOP’s past attempts, combined with the strong support of the party’s grassroots for immigration restriction, have dissuaded Republicans from competing with Democrats in this respect.
The upshot is a Catholic stalemate between the two parties, but Democrats have reason to think that the trend of youth and non-white voting favours their strategy over time. Donald Trump, however, departed from the standard conservative playbook and made a point in 2016 of turning the tables on the Democrats: he made immigration restriction a prominent part of his campaign and sought support from older Americans, whites – including white Catholics – and voters who feared for the cultural cohesion of the country and prioritised jobs for citizens (as they understood things) over free trade and relatively open borders.
Trump made an appeal to community, understood as the national community of existing citizens. This was in contrast both to the values plus free market smarts messaging of older Republicans – of George W Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” as well as the Romney-Ryan ticket’s checklist of economic and social conservative positions – and to the liberal Democratic vision of a nation not as one community but as a patchwork of many small ones, including some that cross borders.
On the face of it, Trump’s successful 2016 strategy was doubly un-Catholic, a repudiation of both the faith-based approach of the Christian right and the community-based approach of the pro-immigration left. Yet by appealing to Americans as Americans, as a community of citizens with particular interests and a shared civic personality, Trump appealed to Catholic Americans as well, for they are the great American middle, not apart from but as a part of the country’s main stream.
Exit polls indicated Trump won 50 per cent or more of the Catholic vote, to Hillary Clinton’s roughly 45 per cent. Subsequent analysis of separate American National Election Studies (ANES) survey data by Mark Gray, of Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, has suggested that Trump won 45 per cent and Clinton took 48 per cent of the Catholic vote. Even if the ANES data as interpreted by Gray is correct, however, Trump won enough of the Catholic vote to get to the White House. And even if the early exit poll data is correct, and Trump won the Catholic vote outright, he has room for improvement. He can’t take the Catholic vote for granted either way – it is neither automatically Republican nor reflexively Democratic.
Yet in working to keep that part of the Catholic vote which he has won before, and in trying to expand it, Trump faces an obvious challenge: namely, how to solidify and broaden the appeal of the nationalist message he used last time – how to make it more Catholic, or at any rate more attractive to Catholics. The answer may go against his instincts: Trump prefers to make his case for nationalism in the most polarising and combative terms. But the same case can also be made in terms of the common good and the Catholic understanding of political community and its duty to its members.
This would not satisfy Trump’s progressive critics, of course, including those within the Church. But the idiom of the common good, and the language to show how that good is expressed through citizenship and the nation, can expand the vision that Trump has already set out, providing it with a deeper dimension that will appeal to Catholics and to all of the American middle.
In the absence of such depth, Trump may still prevail in 2020. But his party, faced with the inadequacy of an ideologically “faith-based” approach and unable to compete with the Democrats in ethnic minority politics, will be adrift unless it can connect the truths Trump has stumbled upon to the greater truths that faith and philosophy have revealed about politics.
Daniel McCarthy is editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review
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