Trump’s Catholic Problem Heading Into November Midterms

Last updated on: August 11, 2026 at 1:11 pm by Andrew Chesnut

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Trump’s Catholic Problem Heading Into November Midterms 2026-08-11T13:11:41-04:00 Andrew Chesnut

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One of the more remarkable stories of the 2024 presidential election was Donald Trump’s success among American Catholics. Catholics, who had split almost evenly between Trump and Joe Biden four years earlier, moved decisively toward the Republican. Pew’s post-election analysis found Trump winning Catholics 55 to 43 percent over Kamala Harris. That was no minor demographic footnote. Catholics constitute roughly a fifth of the American electorate, and their rightward swing contributed significantly to Trump’s return to the White House.

Less than two years later, some of those gains are evaporating. Pew polling shows Trump’s approval among white Catholics dropping from 59 percent in February 2025 to 52 percent this January. The erosion is even more pronounced among Hispanic Catholics, where approval fell from an already modest 31 percent to just 23 percent. Other polling this spring has similarly suggested that Catholics have become considerably less enthusiastic about the president.

For Republicans looking toward November’s midterms, this should set off alarm bells. The explanation begins with something that is easily forgotten in discussions of the “Catholic vote”: there really is no single Catholic vote. American Catholicism is one of the most politically heterogeneous religious traditions in the country. Its pews contain conservative white suburbanites, Latino immigrants, working-class Midwesterners, progressive social-justice Catholics and traditionalists whose politics revolve around abortion and sexuality.

Trump successfully assembled enough of these disparate Catholics in 2024 to produce a genuine electoral realignment. Pew estimates that 55 percent voted for him, compared with 49 percent in 2020. The question heading into November is whether that coalition was durable or merely transactional.

Immigration is one place where the transaction appears to be fraying. Catholic social teaching certainly does not demand open borders, and many Catholics—including Latinos—supported Trump precisely because they wanted greater control over immigration. But there is an enormous moral distance between favoring border security and embracing the most punitive aspects of mass deportation. Images of aggressive immigration enforcement collide with a Catholic institutional culture in which bishops, priests, religious sisters and lay organizations have spent decades ministering to migrants.

For Hispanic Catholics the tension is particularly acute. Immigration policy is not an abstraction when the people being deported might be relatives, parishioners, neighbors or coworkers.

Then there is the unprecedented Trump factor in American Catholic politics: Pope Leo XIV. Trump now finds himself confronting not an aging Democratic politician or progressive activist but the first American pope, a figure who enjoys broad popularity among U.S. Catholics. That creates a political dynamic that simply does not exist among evangelicals. When Trump attacks Leo or dismisses papal criticism of his policies, Catholic voters are presented with two competing visions of Christianity in public life.

Trump emphasizes borders, sovereignty, military strength and trade policy. Leo emphasizes human dignity, migrants, social solidarity and restraint in the exercise of power. For many conservative Catholics these visions overlap on abortion, religious liberty and opposition to progressive positions on gender. But on immigration, economic inequality and war, they can collide dramatically.

There is also growing evidence that Catholics simply do not regard Trump as a particularly convincing religious figure. Pew found in April that 71 percent of Catholics consider him “not too” or “not at all” religious. Among Hispanic Catholics the figure reaches 80 percent. Only 5 percent of Catholics describe him as very religious.

Of course, Trump’s supporters never elected him to be theologian-in-chief. His relationship with conservative Christians has always been transactional. But transactions work best when voters believe they are getting what they bargained for.

This is where the contrast with white evangelicals becomes illuminating. Evangelicals have also cooled on Trump since the beginning of his second term. Pew found white evangelical approval declining from 78 percent in February 2025 to 69 percent this January. More recent fluctuations should therefore be viewed as stabilization or recovery from recent lows rather than evidence that evangelical dissatisfaction has vanished. Nevertheless, Trump’s evangelical floor remains extraordinarily high.

The reason is that white evangelical attachment to Trump has developed into something deeper than agreement over individual policies. For millions of evangelicals, Trump functions as a political protector in an America they increasingly perceive as hostile to conservative Christianity. He delivered the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, appointed conservative judges, championed religious-liberty claims and placed evangelical leaders closer to presidential power than perhaps any modern administration.

Trump does not have to behave like an evangelical. He has to fight for evangelicals. Indeed, only 5 percent of white evangelicals describe Trump as “very religious.” Yet they continue supporting him overwhelmingly. The apparent paradox disappears once Trump is understood less as a spiritual role model than as the champion defending the tribe.

Catholics have no comparable political cohesion. More importantly, they have something evangelicals conspicuously lack: a single global religious authority capable of challenging Trump in explicitly Christian language.

That brings us to November. Catholics were one of Trump’s great success stories in 2024. AP VoteCast likewise found him winning 54 percent of Catholics, compared with 44 percent for Harris. Republicans therefore do not need Catholics suddenly to become Democrats for the erosion in Trump’s standing to matter. A relatively small number of 2024 Trump Catholics staying home, voting Democratic, or simply returning to their pre-2024 voting patterns could become consequential in closely divided House districts and Senate races.

The danger is particularly obvious with Hispanic Catholics. Trump’s gains among Latino voters were central to the narrative of a new multi-ethnic Republican coalition. If Hispanic Catholics conclude that the administration’s immigration policies have gone too far, Democrats have an opportunity to reclaim voters they had begun losing.

White Catholics are equally important because of where many live. Catholic voters are plentiful in precisely the industrial and suburban battlegrounds that determine control of Congress: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and parts of Arizona and Nevada, along with competitive House districts across the Northeast and Midwest. Midterm elections are often decided not by dramatic conversions from one party to another but by comparatively small differences in enthusiasm and turnout.

That may be Trump’s real Catholic vulnerability. A Catholic who enthusiastically voted Republican in 2024 does not have to become a liberal Democrat in 2026. They merely have to become disappointed enough not to vote.

And historically, the president’s party already faces an uphill battle in midterm elections. If declining presidential approval is accompanied by weakening enthusiasm among a constituency that moved significantly toward Republicans just two years ago, marginal House districts become considerably more difficult to defend.

None of this means Catholics are about to abandon the GOP. Abortion, religious liberty, gender politics and dissatisfaction with Democrats remain powerful forces pulling many Catholics toward Republicans. Nor should the durability of Trump’s evangelical coalition be underestimated.

But the religious politics of Trump’s second term are beginning to reveal an important distinction. White evangelical support has become deeply embedded in a politics of religious identity and cultural combat. Catholic support was broader, newer and more contingent.

That made Catholics one of the keys to Trump’s victory in 2024. It could also make them one of the keys to a Republican defeat in November.

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