Both former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have made a concerted outreach to Catholic voters during the campaign, especially in the Catholic-heavy swing states in the Mountain West and Midwest.

But in recent weeks, the Trump campaign has sharpened its focus and deployed its best Catholic surrogates to make a direct appeal, while the Harris campaign has eschewed Catholic outreach in favor of messaging on Trump’s character and the threat they believe he poses to democracy. And when her campaign has brushed up against American Catholicism, it has suffered missteps and miscalculations.

“Democrats do not seem to be concerned with offending Catholics right now,” said Mary Imparato, a professor of politics at Belmont Abbey College. “It just doesn’t seem like the Harris campaign has Catholics on the forefront of their mind.”

In the razor-tight battle for the White House, Catholics voters, who split evenly between Trump and President Biden in 2020, represent a key swing vote in the sharply divided nation. In Pennsylvania, for instance, which many experts believe to be the most consequential of the battleground states, 2020 exit polling found that 30% of the state’s overall vote was Catholic, with Biden securing 52%. The RealClearPolitics average of Pennsylvania polls currently has Trump leading by 0.6% with Catholic voters.

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that Catholic likely voters nationally favor Trump over Harris 51% to 48%

In the past month, the Harris campaign has largely ignored the Catholic vote in messaging, but actions have rung loudly in some Catholic circles. In addition to skipping the Al Smith Dinner, which only one other presidential nominee has skipped in its nine-decades-long history, Harris and her allies have repeatedly given the appearance of disdain for Catholicism.

Stumbles in Michigan

The first and most notable of these incidents came when Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, donning a “Harris/Walz” camouflage cap, posted a bizarre video of herself placing a Dorito on the tongue of a feminist podcaster in a manner resembling Catholic communion. The display, for which Whitmer has issued a lengthy apology, spread quickly across media platforms, drawing heavy criticism from across the Catholic political divide, including a strongly worded rebuke from the bishops of Michigan.

It would have been difficult to stage a more off-putting display for Catholics of every ideological persuasion, particularly for Catholic voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan who comprise roughly one-fifth of the state’s electorate.

“It is not just distasteful or ‘strange,’” said Paul Long, Michigan Catholic Conference president and CEO, in a statement. “It is an all-too-familiar example of an elected official mocking religious persons and their practices.”

After a campaign event on Saturday in Michigan, Harris accompanied Whitmer to a local bar, where the two began to talk about the state of the race, unaware that a C-SPAN camera could detect their conversation. When alerted, Whitmer turned and said, “You’ll bleep my F words, I hope.”

Harris, in response, said, “We just told all the family secrets,” before adding in a cuss word of her own.

Abortion Issue

At an Oct. 21 rally in Wisconsin designed to attract moderate Republican voters, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney joined Harris onstage and pitched the Harris ticket to pro-life voters, saying, “I’m pro-life, and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs.” The moment seemed to signal a potential opening in which the Harris campaign would seriously attempt to court pro-life voters.

Yet in an interview with NBC News’ Hallie Jackson the very next day, Harris flatly rejected the idea of offering a religious exemption for abortion laws. When pressed by Jackson about making an “olive branch” offering to moderate Republicans on the issue, Harris rejected the idea, saying abortion “cannot be negotiable.”

The answer contradicted the previous day’s tone and aligned with Harris’ long record as a pro-abortion advocate, including her introduction of the “Do No Harm Act” to the Senate in 2019, which would have scaled back religious-freedom protections, as well as her role as the Biden administration’s “voice” on abortion-related issues.

And then at a CNN town hall last Tuesday, Harris reiterated her desire to codify abortion rights nationally — even if it means eliminating the filibuster in the Senate to get it done.

For David Barrett, presidential historian and political science professor at Villanova University, Harris’ hard line on abortion may prevent undecided Catholic voters who are uncomfortable with abortion extremism from pulling the lever for her on Election Day.

“I think Harris could have addressed the abortion issue more smartly than she has, and I’m a bit baffled by that,” he told the Register.

“Catholics are not monolithic, and certainly for those Catholics who are unhappy with Trump’s behavior and statements they find offensive, this will make it more difficult to vote for Harris,” he said.

“It makes me wonder if she has any close political advisers who are Catholic or are at least familiar with American Catholicism,” he added. “Maybe if she’d consulted with Biden a bit more, she could have been smarter about this.”

For David Deavel, professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and a political columnist, the Harris campaign’s inability to connect with Catholic voters is indicative of a deeper disconnect with people of faith.

“Though the Harris-Walz campaign has attempted to reach out to people of ‘faith,’ the offensiveness of the engagements with actual faith, particularly that of Catholics, shows a complete lack of understanding and callousness to actual Christian faith,” he told the Register. “It’s not just offensive campaign messaging such as Gretchen Whitmer's Dorito ad, but, more substantively, the stern warning Harris herself made that religious freedom cannot grant exemptions from participation in abortion.”

Vance and RFK Jr. Target Catholics

The Trump-Vance campaign, meanwhile, has appeared laser-focused on appealing to Catholics, both the conservative Catholics who normally support the GOP and nominal Catholics who still identify with certain aspects of cultural Catholicism.

For the former cohort, the campaign has dispatched Vance, a Catholic convert and stalwart of the populist conservatism that has defined the Trump era. In an op-ed published Oct. 24 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Vance railed against the Biden administration’s treatment of Catholics, reminding voters of the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics in recent years, as well as a spate of other incidents that evinced not only a bias, but an apparent animus.

He also wrote scathingly of Harris’ personal history of anti-Catholic behavior, including her 2018 grilling of a federal district-court nominee over his membership with the Knights of Columbus, as well as a host of other incidents.

“Vance comes across as a man of true faith,” said Imparato of Belmont Abbey College. “His support of the dignity of workers, which is aligned with Catholic social teaching, helps him appeal to the Catholic base in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I think he was a great choice for vice president.”

And for the less conservative Catholic voters, the Trump campaign has tapped former Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as lead surrogate. A scion of the most storied liberal Catholic family in American history, Kennedy has himself championed numerous liberal causes throughout his career as a lawyer and political activist.

In a new 60-second ad targeting Catholic voters in the battlegrounds, Kennedy reflects on his own lifetime of “striving to perfect my personal relationship with God” through Catholicism, featuring grainy home footage of himself altar-serving as a child in the 1960s.

“Two features of Catholicism are the notions of original sin and the concept of a forgiving God,” he says as the images play across the screen. “Our job is to strive to perfect ourselves through conscious contact with our Creator, knowing that in human form we’re never going to achieve perfection. We’ll always slip each time we get to get up and strive again. The same’s true for America.”

He then offers his endorsement of Trump, calling the Democrats the “party of war, censorship and corruption.”

“The outreach by the Trump campaign has been smart,” said Barrett. “I don’t think it does more than reinforce tendencies that are already there. But they’ve been smarter than the Harris campaign on Catholic outreach. You don’t win people over by offending them.”