Catholics are split between Republicans and Democrats ahead of the midterm elections and are souring on President Joe Biden, according to a poll released this week.
The RealClearPolitics/EWTN poll found that 44% of Catholic voters said they would vote for Republicans in November while 43% said they would vote for Democrats, as of mid-June, when the survey was conducted. However, 13% were still undecided, and the last months of the campaign season will determine which party secures the majority.
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“It’s remarkable to me how little Biden’s Catholicism figures into the national conversation,” said Carl Cannon, RCP’s Washington bureau chief, on a press call about the survey results. “JFK got 80% of the Catholic vote in 1960. Biden gets a little over half against Trump, and his slippage with this group in this latest poll … is one of the biggest takeaways, in my view.”
In the 2020 election, Biden won the Catholic vote 52% to 47%. Nearly two years later, Catholics are 53% disapproving of Biden’s performance and 47% approving, as well as evenly split 49% to 49% in their favorability of former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s current approval among Catholics is higher than the general population, which Cannon said is because 59% of Hispanic Catholic voters approve of the president, compared to 36% of white Catholics. Even so, Republicans are making major gains among that demographic.
“Hispanic Catholics are more likely than Anglo-Catholics or non-Catholics, for that matter, to think the country is headed in the right direction than in the wrong direction,” Cannon said, adding, “If the Democrats are going to hold either house of Congress in 2022 and keep the White House in 2024, I wonder if Hispanic Catholics are their firewall.”
Nearly 60% of Catholics said the country is on the wrong track, but this was an average of the 68% of white Catholics who said so and the 45% of Hispanic/Latino Catholics who said the same.
On abortion, 42% of Catholic voters opposed overturning Roe v. Wade, but only 18% said access to abortion should be unfettered. On issues of gender in schools, nearly 70% of Catholics opposed students using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that do not align with their biological sexes. An overwhelming 90% favored parental engagement with school curricula.
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The results come as House Republicans are within striking distance of winning a majority. The Senate is up for grabs, too, as are many of the 36 governorships on the ballot in November.
An important caveat of polling Catholics, Cannon said, is that “those who attend Mass daily or weekly tend to be much less supportive of the Democratic Party.”
Catholics comprise the single largest denomination in the United States, with over 70 million adherents accounting for 22% of the population. The RCP/EWTN poll surveyed 1,757 people from June 15-23 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
