Catholic swing voters were critical to Donald Trump's blowout victory: 'Harris snubbed us'

Catholic voters across the country swung massively towards Donald Trump in the 2024 election, contributing to his surprise blowout victory on election night.

Catholics were evenly split between President Joe Biden and Trump in 2020, with 50 percent favoring Trump to 49 percent favoring Biden.

According to exit polling collected by Fox News on election night, Catholics across the country swung nine percentage points in Trump's favor, with the former and now-future president winning Catholics by 10 points.

Bill Donohue, president of the religious civil rights group the Catholic League, told Fox News Digital that Catholics resoundingly rejected Harris because of what he called a "clear animus against Catholics."  

"She was rejected primarily because she is associated with the politics of extremism, and that is something the American people will never countenance," he said.  

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There are approximately 52 million Catholic adults in the U.S., making it the largest religious denomination in the country. Until now, political opinions among Catholic voters have been split between the two parties, leading many to believe that there is no such thing as a Catholic voting bloc.

But after Tuesday's election results, Brian Burch, president of the conservative activism group CatholicVote, is saying that Catholic voters proved that theory wrong.

"There is an emerging electoral trend here that Republicans, if they are smart, will latch onto," he told Fox News Digital.

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CatholicVote issued its first presidential endorsement in its history for Trump in January. 

The group devoted $10 million to advertising, education and a "Catholic-to-Catholic" canvassing program emphasizing the critical swing states.

According to a CatholicVote memo shared exclusively with Fox News Digital, the group contacted over two million Catholic voters across the country, including approximately 100,000 "high affinity, low propensity Catholics" in the swing states Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The memo states that the 2024 election has proven that "Democrats have a Catholic problem, and must now wrestle with the growing influence of the progressive wing of [the] party that is openly hostile to people of faith."

Burch explained that "Democrats in the past have been able to hold together a lot of Catholic voters, whether by tradition or by platitudes around social justice and posturing as if they cared about the poor and vulnerable."

"It turns out in this election, the poor and vulnerable are the people suffering from inflation and from an out-of-control border that had created crime and instability in their communities," he said.

While the Catholic swing exceeded expectations on the national level, the margin of Catholic voters favoring Trump was even larger in some of the most critical swing states.

In Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes and was considered the most important swing state by both candidates, Catholics make up a quarter of the electorate. According to Fox exit polling, Catholic voters in Pennsylvania favored Trump by a margin of 56 to 43 percent, that is 13 points. 

Meanwhile, Catholic voters in two of the next largest swing states - North Carolina (16 electoral votes) and Michigan (15 electoral votes) - voted in Trump's favor by 17 and 20 percentage points, respectively.

Trump also won Wisconsin Catholics by 16 percentage points, helping to deliver the state's 10 electoral votes to the former president.

According to the CatholicVote memo, there were two key moments in the 2024 presidential race in which Harris lost the Catholic vote. The first was when Harris told protestors in La Crosse, Wisconsin, that they were "at the wrong rally" after they shouted, "Jesus is lord." The second was when Harris said in an NBC interview that she opposed religious exemptions for doctors providing abortions.

"Kamala Harris snubbed us, and she repeatedly affirmed our deepest fears about her animus and bigotry towards Catholics. She opposed a judicial nominee because he was Catholic. She introduced legislation that would cut our charities. She said there would be no accommodations for Catholics when it came to her abortion policies, which would effectively have ended Catholic health care in America," he explained. 

In short, Burch said it became clear that Harris presented "a threat to our Catholic way of life."

Meanwhile, Burch said that Trump's message of improving the economy and restoring law and order to the border and to communities has increasingly connected with everyday working-class Catholics. 

What has emerged, Burch said, is a "new synthesis" of what he called "a populist social justice that prioritizes family first policies, America first economic policies, and then, in a larger way, the plight of the everyday American who feels left behind by their own government."

Burch shared that he has been in contact with Trump's policy advisors "fairly regularly" about the issues most important to everyday Catholics and their families. He said that he spoke with Trump just before he took the stage at a rally in Milwaukee last Friday night.

"We spoke about the importance of the Catholic vote and I told him that … Catholics were going to deliver this election for him," he said. "It turns out I was right."