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A Word On the 2026 Catholic Voters’ Shift Towards Democrats

A Word On the 2026 Catholic Voters’ Shift Towards Democrats

Last updated on: November 10, 2026 at 11:51 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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A Word On the 2026 Catholic Voters’ Shift Towards Democrats 2026-11-10T23:51:41-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Let’s talk about American Catholics, and their role in the earth-shattering blue wave last Tuesday.

Even better, let’s take a look at the history of Catholics voting in the past sixty years or so, and what benefit it’s gotten us, so we can understand what happened on Tuesday and imagine what the Catholic vote might look like going forward.

In case you haven’t heard, according to exit polls, American Catholic voters shifted sharply to the left in 2026. In the 2024 presidential elections, about 60% of Catholics polled said they voted for Trump and 39 for Kamala. But in 2026, the split was almost exactly 50-5o, with a hair more Catholics voting Democratic. Some commentators acted shocked about this, but I didn’t find it shocking at all. The fact is, we’ve been spiritually blackmailed into voting for Republicans for sixty years now, and it’s about time Catholic voters got wise.

I want to say first of all that I don’t think it’s a sin to vote for someone I don’t like, depending on your motives. There is no “Catholic” political party, and every party has plenty of problematic things about it. The Catholic Church says that you cannot vote for someone BECAUSE you want them to do something sinful, such as start an unjust war or abuse immigrants. That would be a sin. But you are allowed to vote for someone IN SPITE OF the evil they might do, because you support the good they might do. As long as you’re voting for a good thing instead of a bad one, there’s no sin involved. You and I can get into a big fight and each walk away thinking each other are idiots, and one of us is correct and one of us is mistaken, but neither of us are in sin.

Catholics in America, regardless of our race, were a reliable Democratic voting bloc, until shortly BEFORE Roe. The catalyst wasn’t the Supreme Court’s Roe versus Wade decision, as many people think it was; it was Richard Nixon. Nixon deliberately pitted Catholics and Evangelicals against the feminist movement to unite them under the Republican party, before Roe.

Nixon was inaugurated in 1969. At that point, abortion was already completely legal in eleven states and illegal with exceptions for a mother’s health in most others. It would be legal in thirty states by the time the Supreme Court decided Roe versus Wade in 1973, not so much because of the feminist movement but because doctors insisted that women would die if it wasn’t. The first arguments for Roe versus Wade wouldn’t be heard until halfway through Nixon’s first term. At the time of Nixon’s inauguration, Evangelical Christians were quietly pro-choice, insofar as they thought of abortion at all, but against the feminist movement anyway because they wanted women to be subject to their husbands. Catholics had a religious opposition to abortion and birth control that Evangelicals didn’t share. There wasn’t a real political pro-life movement: abortion was widely considered a matter between a woman and a doctor, except to Catholics. The Democratic and Republican parties had recently switched positions on a lot of issues in response to the Civil Rights Movement, and the dominos were still falling into place about what each party stood for. Neither political party really had a platform on abortion.

I’m not remarking on whether any of this was good or bad. I’m just walking you through the history in broad strokes.

It’s important to remember that at this time in history, Catholics were still not considered “normal Christians” in the United States.

Culturally, we were more or less in the position we’d been since the beginning of the republic: we were viewed as a strange sect of sketchy foreigners and children of foreigners, potential terrorists and spies. Think of the way Abdul Al Sayed’s Muslim faith was treated in his Senate campaign, and the way Ilhan Omar is expected to gracefully put up with disgusting conspiracy theories. Compare that to how President Kennedy had to insist that he was going to uphold the separation of church and state: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic.” Think of the awkward way Walter Cronkite reported that “a Cath-o-lic priest” had been sent to the hospital to administer the president the Last Rites, in the wake of his assassination, as if this was an odd detail. Catholics weren’t “normal Americans.” We were thought of as at best eccentric, and at worst, dangerous. Evangelical Christians in particular hated us and regarded us as not Christian at all. And yes, we tended to vote Democratic.

In the early summer of 1970, just after the Kent State Massacre, Nixon famously referred to the student protesters as “bums” and received a severe backlash. He felt in danger of losing his usual base of white middle class Midwestern voters, who were terrified for their children away at college and offended at Nixon’s dismissal of the killings. So he pivoted. He tried to court Catholic voters to fill in the gaps. He took advantage of our teachings on abortion, to try to turn us against the second wave feminists. He started insisting that the Democratic party was the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” during the 1972 presidential election. Through this constant repetition of the message, Nixon managed to unite the old enemies, the Catholics and the Evangelicals–at least the White Catholics and Evangelicals– into one voting bloc and convince the Evangelicals that they’d had strong views on abortion all along. And it worked. And then, in 1973, AFTER this sea change in American politics, the Roe versus Wade decision made elective abortions legal in all fifty states. But the political shift happened first.

The fledgling pro-life movement under Nixon wasn’t at all concerned with the personhood of the unborn baby, which is what Catholics are supposed to care about. That would all come later. In those first few years, it was a movement that opposed abortion because it opposed feminism in general, and legal abortion was portrayed as an easy way for a woman to get out of her duties as a stay-at-home mom dependent on a husband. The pro-life movement you’re used to, with their talking points about tiny babies suffering and dying, came later on. The idea that we can only look at the abortion issue as a desperate fight to appoint Supreme Court justices who will reverse Roe, instead of a movement to protect life from conception until natural death by opposing war, euthanasia, abortion and the death penalty in all kinds of ways, came later as well. And yes, the false notion that Catholics are somehow in mortal sin or even excommunicated if they vote for a candidate who doesn’t swear they’re going to ban abortion for any reason as their only issue, came later still. It started with us being manipulated into thinking of ourselves as allies with the Evangelicals, so a paranoid president could win a second term.

Somewhere along the line, while all of this was going on, Catholicism gained respectability in the American imagination. By and large we weren’t a vilified “other” anymore. We began to be viewed as a normal vanilla American religion. I’m not going to weigh in right now on how much of that was because we made nice with Evangelicals who still think we’re going to hell, which we never should have done.

For forty-nine years, Catholics were led on again and again that all we had to do was vote Republican and abortion would go away forever: and that we were responsible for killing babies if we did not.

They promised us again and again that all of those sweet little babies would be spared, if only we voted Republican. A Republican president was a pro-life president. Democrats were baby-killers. We were told we had to believe this, EVEN THOUGH abortion rates dropped precipitously no matter who was president since the beginning of the 80s, and nearly always fell a little faster during Democratic presidencies than Republican. We were told we had to keep voting Republican even when abortion rates went up again for a brief time under George W. Bush, and then cratered to their lowest point after the supposed baby killer Obama was able to pass the Affordable Care Act. Then Trump was elected, and the rates started to rise in all the chaos. Still, we were told we had to vote Republican. We were bullied if we didn’t vote Republican. I can’t even count the number of nasty comments and messages I’ve gotten calling me a baby killer and telling me not to receive Holy Communion, for opposing Trump.

Trump appointed those lovely pro-life Supreme Court justices we were told would save the day.

In 2022, the pro-life movement got what it worked so hard for: the Dobbs decision reversed Roe Versus Wade and gave individual states the power to ban or legalize abortion. That’s what Catholics like me had been told the goal was. That’s what we told ourselves the pro-life movement was all about. This was why we were bullied and sometimes spiritually abused into voting Republican right up and down the ticket. That, we’d been told for decades, would make abortion go away forever. Except that it didn’t. It made everything worse.

This isn’t a matter of opinion. I’ve already documented that abortion rates have gone way up since Dobbs. We have lost ten years of progress at least. Reversing Roe made everything worse. And in exchange for the devil’s deal of voting Republican in order to reverse Roe, our country is in a mess. All kinds of people, including natural born citizens, are being harassed and abused by ICE, and some have been killed. There are concentration camps– yes, that’s the technical definition for the immigrant holding facilities– all around the country. We’re embroiled in a war with Iran that the vast majority of Americans oppose, which blew up a school for little girls on the very first day. Millions of Americans are losing their health insurance and access to Medicaid– which is going to further drive up abortion rates, because that’s what happens when you make it so a pregnant woman can’t afford to eat or go to the doctor. And the president and vice president, those squeaky clean pro-life paragons, keep picking fights with the Pope.

Pope Leo keeps stating perfectly normal things for a Pope to say: that war is wrong. That being pro-life is more than just being against abortion and that you can’t call yourself pro-life if you’re not also against the death penalty. And the Republicans in office, including the Catholic ones, are furious. Vice President Vance patronizingly attempted to correct the Pope’s theology. Trump made a fool of himself sparring with the Pope as well.

Last Tuesday, half of Catholic voters decided to punch back. They joined the millions and millions of people in a historic mandate against the Republican party.

So what will happen in 2028, and afterwards?

I couldn’t say. I know that I’m glad such a large chunk of the voting population has, at least for now, realized they’ve been conned.

I am certainly not sorry that for ten years I’ve been voting in opposition to the MAGA movement: to reduce all forms of killing including abortion, instead of in a quixotic quest to make abortion disappear which has made everything so much worse.

Let’s all try to make it a better world.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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