As vice president and now as a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris has doubled down on her staunch support for legalized abortion without restrictions, making it the preeminent issue of her unexpected run for the White House.

It’s a position that one might expect to create problems for Harris with Catholic voters, given the Catholic Church’s strong opposition to abortion. Yet the results of a new survey of Catholic voters by EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research show Harris with a comfortable lead over her Republican rival, former president Donald Trump.

According to the findings, 50% of self-identified Catholic voters currently support Harris for president, while 43% support Trump and 6% are undecided. The gap widens slightly more in Harris’ favor, 53.5% vs. 45.4%, when undecided voters are asked which candidate they’re leaning toward, with less than two months left before the Nov. 5 election.

More Survey Findings

According to the survey, Harris leads Trump among Catholic voters in every region of the U.S. except the South (where she trails by a single percentage point) and in every age-demographic group. She’s also the preferred candidate among every category of Mass-attending Catholics except for daily-Mass attendees, who support Trump 55% to 30%.

What’s more, 48% of Catholic voters in the survey who claim to “accept all Church teachings and that is reflected in how I live my life” say that they would support Harris if the election were held today — as would 49% who believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and 56% who go to confession “at least once a month.” 

The poll, conducted from Aug. 28 to 30, surveyed 1,000 Catholic voters and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

Such strong Catholic support baffles some political experts, including Timothy Carney, a Catholic political commentator and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Kamala Harris is an extremist in defense of abortion, she has persecuted pro-lifers, and I expect her to do the same as president,” he said. “A Catholic supporting her is inexplicable to me.”

The scope of this survey, the first of a series conducted by EWTN News and RealClear Opinion Research this election cycle, doesn’t point to specific policy reasons for a Catholic tilt toward Harris.

But it does identify two key subsets of the Catholic electorate that are solidly in her corner: women and Hispanics.

Harris enjoys a commanding 19-point lead among Catholic women (men support Trump 49% to 43%) and a 2-to-1 advantage over Trump among Hispanic voters, 9% of whom said they remain undecided.

One of those still-undecided voters is Cristal Amador, whose perspective on the race touches on some of the tension points among Catholic voters evident in the survey.

The 29-year-old Latina Catholic social worker in Erie, Pennsylvania, attends Mass weekly at the largely Latino parish of St. Stephen of Hungary in Erie. Calling herself deeply committed to her Catholic faith, she is troubled by Harris’ position on abortion. Yet her perception that Trump “comes off as hostile to women” complicates the idea of supporting the Republican ticket.

“There’s a lot of pros and cons to both sides right now,” she told the Register. 

The pivotal issue for her is the economy.

“I really truly saw the need for single women who are working paycheck-to-paycheck with rent rising and everything,” Amador said.

“Whichever side is willing to help the working class, that’s where I would go with my vote.”

 

Trump Losing Women Voters’ Support

Harris’ robust support among Catholic women voters mirrors the results in recent Quinnipiac and USA Today polls conducted in late August, which found Trump trailed Harris among women 58-37% and 57-36%, respectively. 

In Carney’s view, Harris’ lead among Catholic women underscores Trump’s struggle to appeal to the opposite sex — which, nine years after his entry into national politics, may be a problem without a solution.

“Trump is particularly off-putting to women,” Carney told the Register. “The man bragged about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it because he’s famous. He has mistreated multiple wives.”

Rachelle Walker, assistant professor of politics at University of Mary, believes that Trump’s recent string of statements and proposals that undercut the priorities of the pro-life movement — which were ostensibly made to attract women voters to his campaign — have weakened his support among Catholic women. The absence of a strong pro-life candidate, she believes, has given Catholic women permission to vote on issues unrelated to the sanctity of life. 

“This is the big story right now: Polling numbers for Harris among women are going up on all sides, and Trump doesn’t have much time to win them back,” Walker told the Register. “Even among those Catholic female voters who are very pro-life, Trump’s commitment to the pro-life movement has definitely been curtailed since the last election, making it harder for some female voters to vote for him on policy grounds.” 

Trump’s selection of U.S. Sen. JD Vance, whose previously unearthed comments describing prominent Democrats as “childless cat ladies,” along with various other statements of a similar nature, has further complicated the ticket’s pursuit of women voters and reinforced the perception of hostility toward women. 

For Geoffrey Layman, chair of the political science department at the University of Notre Dame, Vance has made more of an impact on the race than vice-presidential selections usually do — and not for the better.

“The Vance selection hasn’t helped,” Layman told the Register. “The ‘cat lady’ comment is symbolic of the Democrats’ mostly successful attempts to paint Trump and Vance as radical extremists in favor of a return to a very traditional role for women.”

As of today, Vance holds the ignominious distinction of being the most unfavorably viewed vice-presidential nominee of the 21st century, according to the averages of public polling. 

For Walker, Trump’s retreat on protecting the unborn — he recently said his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights” and Vance promised Trump would veto federal abortion-ban legislation — has potentially created an environment in which Catholic voters believe it is morally permissible to vote for either candidate. 

“The even split in candidate preference, even among those who see themselves as especially attached to Church teaching and practice, might be showing us that neither candidate is a strong fit for Catholic values,” she said, “and that voters are having to choose as best as they can from what they’ve been given.” 

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