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Is Trump Losing the Catholics?

Photo courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times There’s a question I haven’t seen answered yet. We all know by now that Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV on Easter Sunday, posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, and spent the week watching Catholic bishops, cardinals, and lay leaders—including conservatives who voted for him—express their dismay in the some of the bluntest terms to date. But what will this cost Trump and his party at the ballot box? Will Catholics choose religious principles over MAGA politics? And if we do see Catholic support for Trump erode, where specifically could this affect the electoral math? How worried should Republicans be about losing the Catholics heading into the November midterms? It turns out that the answers are not only more concrete but more damaging than the GOP would like to admit publicly. Subscribe now The drift was already underway By January of this year, weeks before Operation Epic Fury, and months before Trump’s Easter meltdown, Catholic support for Trump was already eroding. Pew Research data showed his approval among white Catholics had slipped seven points from the start of his second term. Among Hispanic Catholics, the drop was even steeper, falling eight points. Two months can change a great deal. A Fox poll conducted in late March pushed his overall Catholic approval below 50 percent for the first time, with a lopsided 40 percent saying they strongly disapprove, a critical signal of how deeply dissatisfaction now runs. John White, professor emeritus of politics at The Catholic University of America, put it bluntly: Trump’s 2024 coalition is “now in tatters, and Catholics are no exception.” Pew’s senior researcher Gregory A. Smith told OSV News, a Catholic news and information service, that the change had taken place “over the course of the year, rather than recently or rapidly.” In other words, this was not a reaction to a single bad week. Immigration enforcement, tariffs, cost of living, the steady drumbeat of norm-breaking—all of it had been steadily building. But unhappiness over the Iran war, with its consequences at the pump, now appears to have further accelerated the trend. And Trump’s Easter Sunday attacks on the Pope may have broken something that was already badly cracked. To be clear, Catholic erosion is part of a broader pattern. Pew’s January 2026 survey found approval down across virtually every religious group — evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics alike. But unlike evangelicals, Catholics are a genuine swing bloc—still Republican-leaning but with real room to move, unlike groups firmly in the Democratic column. And they are concentrated in precisely the suburban battleground districts and states where even a three- to five-point shift could prove decisive. We can now add a specific and ongoing institutional pressure that no other group faces: a public spat between a warmongering president and an American pope with sky-high approval ratings among Catholic Republicans. Pope Leo ain’t no Pope Francis To be clear, Trump has attacked popes before, which may explain his willingness to take on Pope Leo. He and Pope Francis clashed for years. But Trump’s attacks on Leo carry far more political risk. To understand why, we need to rewind to Francis’s papacy. Conservative American Catholics had their own grievances with the Vatican during this time. Francis was Argentine, identified as theologically liberal, and had tangled with Republican bishops over climate, LGBTQ+ inclusion and immigration for more than a decade. By the end of his papacy, Gallup found only 42 percent of American conservatives viewed Pope Francis favorably. For Trump, that meant attacking Francis came with limited political cost because much of the MAGA Catholic base had already cooled on him. Pope Leo is a different proposition. Last September, Pew Research surveyed American Catholics and found 84 percent held a favorable view of the new pope. Among Catholic Republicans specifically, that number was also 84 percent, far higher than the 69 percent who still viewed Pope Francis favorably in his final months. Leo enters this fight with Trump with a reserve of goodwill among conservative Catholics that Francis simply did not have. When Leo was elected last May, a significant segment of Catholic Republicans hoped he would take the Church in a different direction than Francis had led it. Pew found that 18 percent of Catholic Republicans believed Leo would be different from Francis and saw that as a good thing. That may sound small, but it’s still more than double the share of Catholic Democrats who felt the same way. But that wasn’t to be. Leo has been just as outspoken as Francis on immigration and war, and in some ways more direct. He is simply harder to dismiss, because he is one of their own, and Trump 2.0 on immigration and war is significantly to the right of Trump 1.0. Professor White captures what makes this psychologically distinct from the Francis years. Pope Leo’s “strong and blunt statements about the war,” White told EWTN News, formerly the Catholic News Agency, create “a higher level of cognitive dissonance among Catholics who support Trump but are hearing the words of the pope.” For some, he said, that dissonance will shift opinions. Maybe not for all, but for a good number. David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, framed the stakes even more starkly. While many Catholics have been standing by Trump and criticizing their own bishops for speaking out, eventually they will be faced with “choosing a Catholic-baiting president over their own pope.” That could sit uneasily for many, particularly those already unhappy with the job Trump is doing and the way he is actively insulting Pope Leo. Gibson observed, “American presidents and American Catholics have disagreed with popes in the past. But this is disrespect. Disrespect is way different than disagreement, and that’s the danger for Trump here.” Where the Catholic vote really counts Catholics make up roughly one in five voters nationally. But that national figure obscures their true electoral weight. Catholics are a true swing voting group and are heavily concentrated in the battlegrounds that will decide 2026. New York and New Jersey, two states where nearly a third of all residents are Catholic, account for six competitive House seats between them. In New York, Cook Political Report rates Rep. Mike Lawler’s Hudson Valley seat (NY-17) a true toss-up, having moved from “lean Republican” in November 2025. Meanwhile, three Democratic incumbents (Reps. Laura Gillen (NY-4), Tom Suozzi (NY-3) and Josh Riley (NY-19)) hold seats rated “lean Democratic,” leading both parties to play offense in the state. In New Jersey, Cook Political rates Rep. Tom Kean Jr.’s NJ-7 race a toss-up (also having moved from “lean Republican” in November 2025) and is a top Democratic target. Meanwhile, NJ-9, held by freshman Democrat Rep. Nellie Pou, remains a top Republican target and is both on the DCCC’s initial Frontline list and the NRCC’s initial target list for the 2026 cycle. That’s six seats in play, in just two blue states, where Catholic voters make up an outsized share of the electorate and where even a modest shift in that bloc could hand Democrats the House majority. Zoom out and the picture grows even clearer. A Newsweek analysis mapped Catholic population data against competitive race ratings across the full 2026 battlefield and found the overlap striking. Pennsylvania (21.8 percent Catholic) has three vulnerable Republican-held seats and Wisconsin (21 percent Catholic) has one of the most competitive districts in the country. In the Senate, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina all have tight races where the Catholic vote could prove decisive. Among the demographic fault lines within Catholic voting, none may matter more in suburban swing districts than gender. An EWTN/RealClear poll conducted last November, when Trump still held majority Catholic support, already showed 62 percent of male Catholic voters viewing him favorably compared with only 45 percent of female Catholic voters. Catholic women are more likely to live in the suburban districts that flip House seats, more likely to cite the Church’s social teaching on care for the vulnerable as a political priority, and, as the same poll showed, less likely than men to rank deportations as a top priority. No subsequent poll has broken down Catholic approval of Trump by gender, but the overall Catholic approval numbers have dropped sharply since that November 2025 poll, and broader polling consistently shows women moving away from Trump faster than men. The Catholic gender gap—already baked in before Iran and the pope fight—has likely widened. There is also the Hispanic Catholic dimension. PRRI data from February showed Hispanic Catholic favorability toward Trump at just 25 percent, down from a high of 37 percent in September 2024. That collapse—driven by immigration enforcement, economic anxiety, and now an ugly war the Church has explicitly condemned—has direct implications for competitive districts in Texas, New Jersey and New York, where Latino Catholics comprise a significant share of the electorate. Deeper than one bad weekend There is growing friction between Trump’s governing agenda and basic Catholic social teaching. And it cuts across nearly every major policy area, not just the Iran war. On April 12, three of the most senior Catholic cardinals in the United States — Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark—sat down together on 60 Minutes to address the war and immigration enforcement, in a rare joint interview. Their joint appearance was itself a statement; the last time the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a special unified message criticizing a sitting president’s policy was more than a decade ago. Cardinal McElroy framed the Church’s “just war” argument in terms that left little room for interpretation. “The Catholic faith teaches us there are certain prerequisites for a just war,” he said. “You can’t go for a variety of different aims. You have to have a focused aim, which is to restore justice and restore peace. That’s it.” He acknowledged Iran’s government as “an abominable regime” that “should be removed” — and then said plainly that “this is a war of choice that we went into.” In a separate homily, McElroy said each of the administration’s policy failures in Iran “is equally a moral failure which under Catholic ‘just war’ principles renders both the initiation of this war and any continuation of it morally illegitimate.” Cardinal Cupich took aim at something more specific: the White House’s social media presentation of the war, which has included videos splicing together clips from Top Gun, Braveheart, and video games like Grand Theft Auto with actual combat footage. “We’re dehumanizing the victims of war,” Cupich told 60 Minutes, “by turning the suffering of people and the killing of children and our own soldiers into entertainment.” He called it “sickening.” The congregation at his Washington peace Mass responded with several minutes of applause. On immigration, the tensions are just as stark. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a rare unified rebuke last November denouncing the administration’s “indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” That statement was approved by more than 95 percent of voting bishops. Pope Leo then urged Americans to heed the bishops’ message. Cardinal Tobin of Newark, also on 60 Minutes, called ICE a “lawless organization” when agents “have to hide their identities to terrify people” and violate constitutional guarantees. Then there is the economic disconnect. When EWTN and RealClear polled Catholic voters last November and asked which Trump campaign promise mattered most, 40 percent said reducing inflation, by far outpacing every other issue. Only 15 percent named deportations. Catholics voted for economic relief, but it’s not at all what they got. As affordability grows ever more out of reach, driven in part by the war of choice the Church has now condemned, these economic voters may angrily vote their pocketbooks in 2026, just as many did in 2024. Pope over president? Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American Studies and History at Notre Dame, offered the long view on Trump’s fight with the pontiff: “Emperors, monarchs, and despots have long threatened popes in an effort to force them to bend to their will,” she said. “In an American context, however, Trump’s invective does represent a historic reversal.” And David Gibson’s question raised earlier—will Catholics choose the pope or the president?—now looms large, especially going into the fall campaign. In 2024, Trump won Catholic voters by 12 points. That margin is now underwater in national polling, and the dioceses that matter most to the midterm map are in the states where the Senate and House majorities will be decided. The November answer remains uncertain. But the question has never been more open.

Apr 15, 202620 votes

Electoral Wipeout

Image courtesy of PlusMinus4 substack Because of insane developments in Iran on Tuesday evening, I didn’t get a chance to write about this week’s election results. But let’s put it out there proudly: Democrats had a good night on Tuesday. A very good night. In Wisconsin, the liberal candidate for the state Supreme Court won by 20 points (!) in a state historically decided by less than a single percentage point over the last three presidential elections. In Georgia, the Democrat running in one of the reddest congressional districts in the country moved the needle 25 points (!!) to the left from where Trump finished in 2024. Republicans ultimately held that Georgia seat, but in Wisconsin, Democrats flipped a conservative court seat and expanded the liberal majority to 5-2. In both states, the results tell a story that should have the GOP worried well into November. Let’s walk through what happened and why it matters. Subscribe now Georgia: A YUGE swing in Trump Country Start with the number 25. That’s the number of points the needle moved to the left in GA-14. We don’t expect to see movement like that in a congressional district, let alone one as deep-red as northwest Georgia’s 14th that Donald Trump carried by 37 points just 16 months ago. Democrat Shawn Harris, a retired Army brigadier general and cattle rancher running for the first time, lost to Trump’s handpicked Republican Clay Fuller. But he moved the district so far from the 2024 presidential baseline that CNN recognized it as the largest Democratic overperformance in a House special election since Trump first took office. This happened even as national Republicans made the very unusual decision to spend real money defending a seat they should have had on cruise control. Trump even traveled to the district to rally for Fuller in February. Consider what a 25-point shift means when applied to the seats that will decide House control. As the New York Times noted, nearly two dozen House Republicans won their 2024 races by 10 points or less. A shift of two and a half times that magnitude in November would turn toss-ups into Democratic pickups. The geographic details of the race make the picture even clearer. According to the Times, all 10 of the district’s counties shifted blue by double digits compared with 2024. Shawn Harris even won Cobb County, the district’s most suburban corner, outright with 58 percent of the vote. Moreover, the Democratic vote share actually grew from March’s primary to April’s runoff, from about 40 percent combined Democratic in the first round to 44 percent for Harris alone, even as Republicans threw money at the race. Momentum was moving in the wrong direction for the GOP in this race, just as it has been everywhere we look. Harris put it plainly on election night: “If Democrats, independents and Republicans can do this in a ruby-red district, the Democrats can win anywhere.” Georgia Democrats are already pointing to Tuesday as a boost for Sen. Jon Ossoff, who faces re-election this fall in a state Trump won by just two points. Here are some of the top-line numbers and takeaways for GA-14: Wisconsin: Dems consolidate control of the state Supreme Court If Georgia’s result shook the confidence of House Republicans for November, Wisconsin’s results will stir their anxieties about the decade ahead. In the race for an open seat on the state Supreme Court, Democratic-backed appeals court judge Chris Taylor won by roughly 20 points, expanding the liberal majority from 4-3 to 5-2. That is the largest margin in a competitive Wisconsin Supreme Court race since 2000. Her overperformance against the 2024 Democratic presidential baseline was 21 points, and she improved by 10 points over last year’s liberal victory. If you recall, that was the race where Elon Musk got involved, spent $25 million, and was trounced anyway. The 2025 race drew over $100 million in total spending. The 2026 race drew only about $6.5 million, with Democrats outspending Republicans on TV ads nine to one. Their candidate won by 21 points and didn’t need a celebrity villain. Wisconsin Supreme Court: Moving strongly leftward under Trump As the Washington Post reported, liberals are now positioned to hold their majority until at least 2030. They could pick up yet another seat as early as next year, when a retiring conservative justice means another seat will need to be filled. In any event, the liberals’ hold on the court is secured through the next presidential election. That could matter a lot: If 2028 produces election disputes in Wisconsin, as is likely, this is the court that will resolve them. It’s the same court that upheld Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 by a one-vote margin. That margin is now 5-2. Contrary to popular assumption, the blue shift wasn’t largely confined to liberal enclaves. In the rural “Driftless Area” of southwest Wisconsin, full of blue-collar, small-town communities that swung hard toward Trump in 2016 and again in 2024, the movement on Tuesday was equally dramatic. Trump the “conservative” had carried that region roughly 54 to 46 percent in 2024, an 8-point Republican margin. On Tuesday, the liberal Taylor carried those same communities roughly 60 to 39 percent—a 21-point margin. That’s a whopper of a swing, about 29 points in a single year in rural, working-class Wisconsin. The collapse of the GOP is not just a story about college-educated suburbs drifting left. The rural realignment that handed Trump the state is showing real cracks. The practical stakes are significant. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to rule on abortion restrictions, a challenge to the union-busting legislation conservatives rammed through a decade ago, and, most consequentially, two pending lawsuits over Wisconsin’s congressional district map. That map, which is heavily gerrymandered in favor of the GOP, currently apportions six of the state’s eight congressional seats to Republicans. Those redistricting cases are expected to reach the state’s highest court, though probably not before November. But a fair reapportionment in 2030 could offset some of the seats Democrats are expected to lose to red states as a result of the census. Waukesha: the story within the story County-level results in Wisconsin deserve their own moment because they illuminate just how structural this shift is. Waukesha County has been the Republican Party’s single largest source of votes in Wisconsin for generations. As recently as 2012, Mitt Romney carried it with 67 percent of the vote. On Tuesday, the Republican-backed state Supreme Court candidate managed just 54 percent. That’s four points less than even the conservative candidate who got trounced statewide last year. The New York Times put the math plainly: Given Democratic strength in Milwaukee and Madison, Republicans must deliver a big margin in Waukesha to have any shot at winning statewide. Now that margin is evaporating. Then there’s the Waukesha city mayoral race, which understandably drew almost no national coverage, but which has emerged as a bellwether. And hoo, boy. The Democrat Alicia Halvensleben defeated Republican state Rep. Scott Allen to become mayor of one of the most reliably Republican cities in the state. To their credit, Democrats have been organizing in Waukesha County for years with an eye toward state legislative seats this fall. Tuesday was evidence that organizing pays off. Ben Wikler, the former Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, cited Trump and his economic policies as a primary driver of the shift away from the GOP. He told the Times, “Since the 2025 Supreme Court rout, Trump has only gotten more extreme and unhinged, daily life has become even less affordable, and the voters most closely tracking the news have reached volcanic levels of outrage.” A much larger pattern Tuesday’s results didn’t come out of nowhere. They are the latest and sharpest data points in a trend that has held across every special and off-cycle election since Trump returned to the White House. According to The Downballot, Democrats have improved upon their 2024 presidential margins by an average of 11 percent in special elections so far in 2026 and roughly 13 percent since the start of 2025. Seven U.S. House of Representatives special elections have been held in the past 15 months. Democrats improved their vote share in every one of them, with an average gain of about 15 percent. The pattern has held beyond special elections. Democrats won commanding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races in the 2025 general election. They’ve flipped 30 red-state legislative seats to blue while Republicans have flipped none. Primary turnout is surging in some of the most Republican states in the country. In Texas last month, a record 2.3 million votes were cast in the Democratic primary—more than in the Republican primary. In North Carolina, it’s the same story, where 174,000 more North Carolinians voted in the Democratic primary than in the Republican one. And in Mississippi, Democratic primary turnout was up over 52 percent from the last comparable Senate primary. G. Elliott Morris, who tracks these numbers closely, pointed to what he called “the Iran factor.” Tuesday was the first real election since Trump started the war against Iran on February 28. The swings in Wisconsin and Georgia, 21 and 25 points respectively, are roughly double the 2025-2026 special election average. Pre-election polls had Taylor winning Wisconsin by about seven points; she won by 20. Notably, undecided voters broke toward the Democrat by something between 20 to 30 points. That indicates voters who hadn’t made up their minds yet are breaking against the party in power. What November could look like CNN’s Harry Enten discussed the historical numbers on air Wednesday and arrived at a striking conclusion: Five out of five times since the 2005-2006 cycle, the party outperforming in special elections went on to win the House. Democrats are currently performing better than they did in 2017-2018, the cycle that produced a 40-seat blue wave. Prediction markets have taken notice. Bettors have put Democrats at 51 percent to take back not just the House, but the Senate as well. It’s up, as Enten put it, “like a rocket.” Prediction markets swing wildly, so perhaps this alone is not yet enough for Democrats to hope to reclaim the majority. But if trends hold, even the Senate could come into play. The stakes in Wisconsin and Georgia are high. In Wisconsin, Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s 3rd Congressional District is a Cook Political Report toss-up. And in Georgia, the open governor’s race and the Ossoff Senate seat are both competitive. Democratic enthusiasm just got a significant boost in both states. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating sits at a record low of some 39 percent as an average across polls, driven by an unpopular war in Iran, rising gas prices, and economic anxiety that shows no sign of easing. While the party in power nearly always loses ground in midterms, in 2026, the Republicans appear to be losing it faster than usual. There’s another dimension to Tuesday’s results: what they mean for the state of Florida and its congressional delegation. Gov. DeSantis has called a special redistricting session on April 20, following through on Trump’s push for Republican-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps. His express goal is to squeeze more Republican seats out of a state that already sends 20 Republicans and just 8 Democrats to Congress. The present electoral environment, however, is making some Republicans in Florida very nervous. In March, Democrats flipped two Florida state legislative seats. One of those was Trump’s own Palm Beach House district that he had won by 11 points in 2024. Given these results, Rep. Greg Steube warned, “I think the Legislature needs to be very cognizant of the fact that if they get too aggressive … you could put incumbent members at risk.” Rep. Daniel Webster put it more simply: “Don’t do it.” Their concern has a name: the dummymander. It’s when you try to help yourself with an aggressive redistricting and wing up hurting your own party instead because you’ve underestimated how strong the political winds could blow. UCF political science professor Aubrey Jewett told NPR that while redistricting will probably go forward, “it will not be quite as aggressive as it would have been.” That’s because when you redraw safe seats to capture more territory, you make those seats more competitive in the process. Hakeem Jeffries has already issued his warning: “We will crush House Republicans in November if DeSantis tries to gerrymander the Florida congressional map.” In this environment, that’s not an idle threat. All caveats, of course There are of course limits to what we can read into Tuesday’s results. Special elections are not general elections. Turnout is lower and more self-selected. The environment can shift between April and November. As one analyst noted about the GA-14 election, “I would be very cautious about reading too much into the results of a low-turnout runoff when trying to predict what will happen in November 2026.” That caution is real. Democrats still have organizational work to do, primaries to win, funds to raise, and a challenging Senate map to navigate. Special elections can flatter and then disappoint. And yet, the breadth and depth of these wins are hard to dismiss. The pattern has held across more than three dozen races, two governors’ elections, a string of state legislative flips, and primary turnout surges in some of the deepest red states in the country. Democrats lost a congressional seat in one of the reddest districts in Georgia on Tuesday…and the party still celebrated because the shift told them what they needed to know. When you’re closing 37-point gaps to high single digits, winning a Supreme Court seat by 20 in a state decided by less than a point three times running, flipping the mayor’s office in a Republican stronghold, and watching undecided voters choose your party by margins that pollsters couldn’t predict — the direction of the country is coming into clear focus. The exits are getting crowded I want to close by highlighting a quieter story running alongside Tuesday’s stunning results. According to Rolling Stone, only 374 of the 435 House members are currently seeking reelection. That’s the lowest number in the 21st Century and the second lowest since 1946. As The Hill reported, 36 House Republicans have already announced they won’t seek reelection, surpassing the previous record of 34 set in the 2018 cycle, the last time Democrats flipped the House. That number is expected to keep growing. DCCC spokesperson Justin Chermol put it plainly: “’Republicans know they are going to lose in November. By retiring now, they’re avoiding the inevitable humiliation of losing their seats.” Tuesday gave a few more of them something to mull as they look ahead to the rest of 2026 with growing dread.

Apr 9, 202618 votes

Electoral Wipeout

Apr 9, 202612 votes

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Is Trump Losing the Catholics?

Electoral Wipeout

Electoral Wipeout