For decades, E. J. Dionne has studied the intersection of religion and American politics, with a particular focus on Catholic engagement in the political arena, as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and as a columnist for the Washington Post. During my final semester at Georgetown University, I had the opportunity to take a course on religion and the future of American democracy with Professor Dionne. Following the presidential election, I spoke with him about the impact of the Catholic vote—which, according to a CNN exit poll, favored President-elect Donald Trump by 58 percent—and possible paths forward for Catholics in both major parties. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Back in 2000, you famously wrote in a piece for the Brookings Institution that “there is no Catholic vote, and yet, it matters.” Do you think this is still true in 2024, or can we speak of a unified Catholic vote now?
The Catholic vote still matters for several reasons. I said back then that the fact that there is “no Catholic vote”—that is, no single, unified Catholic bloc—is also why it matters. It’s very hard for either party to fall below 40 percent among Catholics. Even in the CNN exit poll, which is particularly strong for Trump among Catholics compared with the pre-election polls, Harris still wins 40 percent of the Catholic vote. And when Republicans do very badly in an election, they still get at least 40 percent of the Catholic vote. This means that there’s a lot of swing within our community. Historically, though less so now, this has often been the result of cross-pressures on Catholic voters: broadly Democratic views on labor and social justice, paired with views more associated with Republicans on abortion.
The Catholic vote is also strategically located. As long as Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all states with substantial Catholic populations—are swing states, the Catholic vote will remain very important.
Why did so many Catholics vote for Trump?
I’m still trying to make sense of the CNN poll, which shows quite a big margin for Trump among Catholic voters. This is radically different from the polling that came before the election. A Pew Research Center survey in September found Trump leading Harris narrowly, and an EWTN poll at the end of August found Catholics favoring Harris. A lot of the polling I was looking at over the last couple of months of the campaign showed a sharp split among Latinos, with Latino Catholics voting for Harris and Latino Protestants voting for Trump. The exit polls suggest that either an extraordinary shift took place in the course of the campaign, that the earlier polls were off—or the exit poll overestimated Trump’s Catholic share. We’ll figure this out over time.
But there is no question that Trump posted gains over Biden’s 2020 performance with Catholics, when Biden won 52 percent of the Catholic vote. I suspect that, when more state-specific data comes out, we’ll see those gains were particularly important in Pennsylvania.
What remains clear in all the polls is that white Catholics were substantially more for Trump than Latino Catholics were.
When we talk about Catholics who vote for Trump, the explanation that usually comes up is abortion—it’s sort of the conventional story of why some Catholics go G.O.P. Yet Trump didn’t run a particularly anti-abortion campaign, and at times he even seemed to run away from the issue. On Election Day, he even refused to say whether he’d voted against Amendment 4 in Florida. Do you think abortion still explains many Catholics’ Trump support in 2024, or is there more to the story?
I think it’s pretty clear that abortion was not the driver for most Catholics. Trump has entirely abandoned the abortion issue; he took a lot of different positions on it during the campaign, and he (and the Republican party generally) realized that they’re facing an electorate in which 60 percent or more of the voters favor reproductive rights; the percentage of anti-abortion voters is in the 30s. The surveys are clear that a backlash to Dobbs substantially increased support for reproductive rights. Trump pivoted because he knew that a strong anti-abortion stand, including a national ban, would hurt him. Instead, he tried to win the socially conservative vote with that famous “trans ad” that he put out against Harris. And social conservatives, including socially conservative Catholics, stuck with him.
But we’ve also seen over time that white Catholics increasingly vote the same way as white Protestants. Catholics who voted for Trump did so for a whole range of reasons, including immigration; conservative Catholics tend to support much tougher policies on immigration, despite the stance of most of the church hierarchy.
Pro-life Catholics—and the church—will have to think hard about this. If abortion is your issue, you’re not getting much out of Trump, and you may not get much out of the incoming Republican Congress. They have to ask themselves: Am I really voting for Trump because of his position on abortion, or am I actually voting for him for other reasons? And should I think about a different way of being pro-life?
What could that new way of being pro-life look like?
Within parts of the pro-life movement, there has been a move toward a more pro-family politics, as Emma Green wrote in a fascinating piece in The New Yorker. It is defined by support for a child tax credit, more generous family leave policies and affordable child care. In my most optimistic moments, I think there is some possibility of an alliance between progressives who support these policies for broad reasons related to social justice and conservatives who support these policies on pro-family grounds. That would be a very constructive form of politics, a coalition similar to the alliance between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in Europe that helped build the postwar welfare state. That postwar system of social protection developed from both social democrats’ commitments to greater equality and the Catholic Church’s teaching.
I’m afraid that, in the current landscape of American politics, it’s a long shot. But I would love to see Catholics, from bishops to laity, make more of an effort to create openings for this kind of common ground.
Let’s talk about the victorious party for a moment. During Trump’s campaign, much was made of a supposed populist, pro-worker shift within the Republican Party. There’s this idea that the G.O.P. has become the party of workers, of families, of “the little guy,” mantles often claimed by Democrats. Do you think this is real—or genuine?
If you listen to what they say and occasionally look at some of the alliances they’ve formed in Congress with Democrats, there is a group of Republicans—[JD] Vance is one, [Josh] Hawley is another, along with think tanks like Oren Cass’s American Compass—who have at times seemed serious about this. But congressional Republicans are now saying that their immediate priority is to renew the Trump tax cut, or even cut the corporate tax rate even further, which will redistribute wealth toward the top. This is standard Republican orthodoxy.
I think the test will come on the child tax credit. There are Republicans who have made proposals in Congress for the child tax credit. In July, Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) introduced a bill to expand the availability of child care. So these things are out there, but will any of them come to fruition in a Republican Congress under a President Trump? I’m skeptical but try to remain hopeful. I’ve always thought there are two areas where common ground should be possible: on family policies of this sort and on the need to build community to fight social isolation. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has done exceptional work in that area and has built an alliance with Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah). These are such traditionally Catholic concerns, and even in a polarized time, there might be some possibilities of forward movement on them.
What do you think the rise of JD Vance says about Catholic politics today?
I don’t pretend to have figured him out. There are aspects of Vance that deeply trouble me—none more so than what he said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Those were flat-out lies, which he defended because he said they told a broader truth about immigration. I found that hideous.
Vance is a convert to Catholicism, but both of us, I think, know people who were converted by social-justice strains of Catholicism and others converted by more conservative strains. Vance is more in the traditionalist mold of Professor Adrian Vermeule at Harvard or of my old Georgetown colleague, now at Notre Dame, Patrick Deneen.
Of course, I’d like to hope that Vance will be a voice for at least some of this pro-worker, pro-family-support politics that we were talking about. But I have no idea where he’s going to go.
Let’s move over to the Democratic side. President Biden is only our second Catholic—and second Catholic Democrat—in the White House. He was always very open about his faith, from little things like his attachment to the Rosary and regular church attendance to larger issues, such as how his faith helped him through periods of grief. Do you think we’ll see any more “Biden Democrats” in the future?
As Bill Clinton might say, it depends on what the meaning of the words “Biden Democrats” is! Biden was certainly the last of a kind, and that has to do with his age. He grew up in an old, strongly solidaristic Catholic culture that was very much defined by the church. In Biden’s youth, the church, the union and the Democratic Party often seemed like one institution in many communities around America, as they did in my hometown of Fall River, Mass. (By the way, Fall River voted for Trump, the first time a Republican carried the city in 100 years, which is a dramatic sign of what happened with working-class voters this year.) Biden is very observant in all of the ways that so many Catholics in that generation were.
Also important in distinguishing Biden from Catholic politicians who will come after him: He came of age in the Vatican II era and the civil rights era.
The next generation had a very different upbringing because these old Catholic communities began to disappear. There are still some social justice-oriented Democrats, like Tim Kaine, whose experiences were shaped by the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and other initiatives rooted in Catholic social thought. They still exist in the party. But I don’t think we’ll ever see a Catholic like Biden again; he’s a loyal product of an earlier generation.
Democrats made abortion central to their messaging in this campaign and didn’t reap the benefits they’d hoped for. Do you think they might moderate their pro-choice stance going forward, perhaps by compromising on limits to legal abortion, and try to win back more Catholics that way?
I think people forget that Roe v. Wade itself was a compromise! I know it didn’t feel that way to people in the pro-life movement, but Roe was quite clear that regulation by the government was allowed in the third trimester. Many people who support a paradigm like Roe are not in favor of entirely unregulated abortion.
The Democratic Party will remain strongly in favor of reproductive rights. But I think the more interesting question is: How many Democrats will seek common ground with Republicans on family policy, as we discussed earlier? The number of abortions has always tended to drop under Democratic administrations, perhaps because they provide more help for women who want to bring children into the world—as Biden has tried to do with the child tax credit.
So if we ever have a Catholic Democratic president again, what do you think that person might look like? What might be their differences from Biden?
I think that president would combine legal support for reproductive rights with something like the pro-family agenda I described previously. They would try to make a case, within the Catholic tradition, that if your interest is in expanding the possibility for women to bring children into the world, most of the measures you want to take are progressive economic measures. (It’s also worth noting that in Ireland and Italy, historically two of the world’s most Catholic countries, voters backed broadly legal abortion in referenda.)
One of the most powerful interventions on this question came from former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.). While giving a talk at Fordham University, he asked his audience to imagine a single woman working in a textile factory in North Carolina who becomes pregnant. Kerrey asked his audience to consider a world in which her job pays well, she has health care coverage and some leave after the child is born. Then he asked them to see her in an alternative world of low wages, no health coverage and no leave time. Under which circumstances, Kerrey asked, “Would she more likely choose life?” On abortion, I think that’s the stance the next Catholic Democrat to win the White House might take.
What do you think Catholics should have in mind as we prepare for the second Trump administration?
The Trump administration is going to present real challenges to Catholics. The biggest challenge will come on immigration. If Trump is true to his campaign promise to round up millions of people who have been living and working here without legal status—breaking up mixed-status families and sweeping away legal immigrants in the process—the church has a moral obligation to stand up and say: This is wrong.
A long time ago, I said that I proved I was a “real Catholic” because I thought the church’s job was to make all of us feel guilty about something in politics—that there are some ways in which our own positions don’t match the church’s, just as my conservative friends hold positions contrary to church teaching. I confess that I have worried in recent years that the church seems more interested in making liberals feel guilty about something than in doing the same for conservatives. During this administration, there will be times when the church will need to call our conservative brothers and sisters to examine their consciences, especially where immigrants and our poorest citizens are concerned. I hope it does.
