The Next Pope And Donald Trump

Guess who's the most popular Republican President among American Catholics?

It’s an election year, after all - a papal election, that is.

Handicappers seem to believe Pope Francis’s successor is most likely to be a man who will follow in his footsteps as a global leftist on many political issues, at least relative to his predecessors at the Vatican.

But even if the pope-to-be is a political leftist as Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio was, he will preside over an American Catholic flock that has moved decidedly to the right in recent years.

Exit polling by NBC indicates Donald Trump scored 59 percent of the Catholic vote in the United States in the 2024 election, up from the 47 percent he attracted in 2020 against a devout Catholic opponent, Joe Biden. Given Trump’s thin margin of victory in bellwether states with major Catholic populations, like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and in the Southwest, it’s reasonably to theorize that Catholic voters who switched to Trump might have made him the 47^th president.

Trump’s 59 percent among Catholics in 2024 did not just improve on his total, it’s almost certainly better than any Republican candidate to run for President during the reigns of the last seven popes. Exit polls as we know them date to the 1972 election, when Nixon got 54 percent of Catholics, a figure Ronald Reagan matched in 1984.

Gallup estimated the Catholic vote as 33 percent Republican in the 1968 election, and we can be sure Barry Goldwater’s number was less in the landslide of 1964. I’ll wager you anything, including my dog, that John Kennedy won Catholics during the reign of Pope John XXIII in 1960, and that gets us all the way back to Pope Pius, who reigned from 1939-1958.

That makes Trump the most popular Republican among Catholics in the modern age. Let that sink in.

Political wags often flag Trump’s support among evangelicals as his secret weapon but his backing among Catholics is more unusual and therefore notable. Salena Zito and I devoted a chapter in our book The Great Revolt to the vital support for Trump, who’s personally quite secular, among devout Christians, both Protestant and Catholic alike. Over the years as I give speeches on the book, I’ve noticed that peculiarity – a thrice-married Manhattan playboy building a potent base among the most religiously conservative – has gone from the most-asked question from audiences to something they just take for granted.

Pope Francis’s legacy is global, so his relationship with Trump will rightly be just a footnote this week as his ministry is recapped, but his reign does correlate neatly to Trump’s rise, and political analysts will be tempted to look for connectivity.

I’m a Protestant, and adamantly so, so my understanding of the Catholic mind is limited, but I’m skeptical that backlash to the left-wing policy decisions of Pope Francis – including repeated criticism of Trump’s immigration policies - had any impact on the rightward drift of the American Catholic vote. For most Christians, eternal matters transcend temporal politics and I’m confident he’s being mourned and honored equally by Catholics of all political persuasions.

More than likely, the U.S. Catholic shift is the result of the rising secularization of the American Left, which is becoming hostile to not just Catholicism, but to all people of faith.

I often give speeches to groups of politically active Jewish voters, long America’s most liberal white religious bloc. Since the atrocities of 10/7, and the indifference of Democratic politicians to the antisemitic protests that have followed in the streets and on campuses, the wobble among many Jewish voters to become at least right-curious has been unmistakable.

Left wingers are not marching and chanting calls for Catholic genocide, but attuned Catholics can still see Democratic politicians coming after them. Even in the administration of Joe Biden – a weekly mass attender his whole life – Democratic regulators harassed Catholic hospital chains and implemented new rules aimed at curbing the conscience protections for Catholic doctors and nurses to opt out of abortions and transgender surgeries. The Biden Administration not only disbanded an office Trump had set up within the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights to pursue litigation supporting conscience objections – it went the other direction, forcing Catholic hospitals to take Biden to court.

Amy Coney Barrett faced criticism for her Catholicism when Trump nominated her for the Supreme Court in 2020. A headline for the house organ of snotty secular liberals, National Public Radio, lamented “Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholicism May Be Controversial But May Not Be Confirmation Issue” – and the story warned “never before has the Court been so dominated by one religious denomination.” Senator Diane Feinstein admonished Barrett with a naked religious slur: “the dogma lives loudly within you and that’s a concern.”

As stridently as Biden’s pit bull bureaucrats, his replacement on the Democratic ticket by Kamala Harris likely made Catholic voters even more uncomfortable. As a Senator in 2019, Harris had questioned the fitness of judicial nominee Brian Buescher to serve on the bench because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus. Apparently running Friday Lenten fish fry picnics and raising money for children’s hospitals is offensive to secular-istas if it’s done in Jesus’ name.

With the Democratic Party becoming an open bastion of seculosity (a great term coined by author David Zahlthat I’m expropriating for a different context) practicing Catholics may be shifting to make their faith a larger part of their identity. Ryan Burge, an academic who tracks these matters better than anyone with his awesomesubstack, Graphs About Religion, notes that among white religious groups, only evangelicals self-report that their faith is more central to their views of themselves than Catholics do.

Burge also flags that the only group of white Christian groups won by Harris was Episcopalians, and it’s well documented that the Republican vote share of Hispanic Catholics is on a hockey stick trajectory upward. Democrats are fast becoming the party of the non-religious, and even in a country where religiosity is fading, that’s an unenviable political position for electoral math.

The next pope is likely concerned about vote-counting in the papal conclave right now instead of in American mid-terms, but here’s hoping he – whoever he is – will throw the weight of the church behind a defense of robust religious practice in American life, no matter which party he must confront.