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Catholic voters backed Democrats for Congress on Tuesday by 50 percent to 49 percent, according to the NBC News Exit Poll.
Two years ago, the same poll found Catholics favoring Republicans 59 to 39, Religion News Service reported. That is a 21-point swing in the margin, and it came in the first midterm election since a son of Chicago became Pope Leo XIV.
Catholics cast one of every five ballots this year. Democrats won the House popular vote by about 13 points, a margin no party has reached in a midterm since 1974, and they took back the Senate with it.
The breakdown tells the story of where the Church is heading. Hispanic Catholics voted 65 percent Democratic, and so did Catholics under 29, while 87 percent of Black Catholics did the same, Will Martino reported in America.
Catholic women gave Democrats 54 percent of their votes. White Catholics still leaned Republican (56 percent backed GOP candidates, rising to 63 percent among those without a college degree), as did 55 percent of Catholic men.
What the early numbers can and can’t tell us
Exit polls are first drafts. Martino noted that the Catholic figures “were still being adjusted on the day after the election, and other estimates of how U.S. Catholics voted are sure to appear in the coming weeks.”
The 2020 race shows why that caution is earned. The network exit poll that year had Joe Biden winning Catholics 51 to 47, while AP VoteCast put Donald Trump ahead 50 to 49, the National Catholic Register reported at the time. Mark Gray of Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate called it “a tie” once the margins of error were counted.
Studies that check survey answers against actual voter files come later, and the Catholic number in this midterm may shift by a point or two in either direction when they do.
A few points, however, will not erase a 21-point move. Every religious group in the exit polls either held steady or moved toward Democrats this year, with Jewish voters the lone exception, according to the Christian Post.
Analysts are already arguing over the cause. Ryan Burge, the Washington University political scientist, told America that “this is about the economy being bad.” JD Vance, a Catholic convert, blamed the war in Iran.
Both men are describing the same rupture. Pope Leo spent this year pleading with Americans to end that war, and Catholics heard him while the White House brushed him aside.
The attacks came from the top of the Republican Party. In April, Donald Trump called the pope “weak” on crime and “terrible” for foreign policy. That same week, JD Vance warned Leo to be careful when giving opinions about theology, while Speaker Mike Johnson lectured the Augustinian pope on “something called the just war doctrine.” Seven months later, Catholic voters had their say.
By October, Trump’s approval among Catholics had fallen to 30 percent, down from 47 percent when he took office. On Tuesday, a great many of them carried that faith into the voting booth and turned it against MAGA authoritarianism.
What this community built
I won’t pretend a newsletter moved 21 points. Millions of Catholics made their own choices before God, in their own consciences. Still, a great many people reading this did the slow, unglamorous work of a movement this fall, and they deserve to see the record of it.
Together we built Catholic voter guides for 506 Senate, governor, and House races in all 50 states. Each one set the candidates side by side on the nine issues Pope Leo has raised, from war and immigration to AI, the unborn, and the death penalty, with every position sourced and no candidate endorsed.
As I reported on Sunday, those guides reached more than 100,000 Americans before Election Day.
Then you signed your names. As of this afternoon, 16,865 people have taken the pledge to vote as Pope Leo voters, among them Robert in Steubenville, Maria in Chicago, Alejandro in Houston, and Sandra in Murfreesboro.
Long before the guides, there was Iran.
When Leo invited Americans in April to contact their members of Congress “to work for peace and to reject war and violence,” 48,333 people answered through our Stand with Pope Leo campaign.
Look at where we started.
In November 2024, when Catholics handed Trump their votes, there was no American pope and no Letters from Leo. On Jan. 1 of this year, this community counted 16,891 subscribers; today it counts 38,431.
The work ahead
Tuesday was a beginning. White Catholics and Catholic men still favored Republicans, and the young Catholics who broke so hard for Democrats will judge the new majority by what it delivers.
Democrats now have to govern with humility, and we have to hold them to it, as I wrote the morning after the election. A Catholic left that cheers for a party without demanding anything of it betrays the Gospel it claims.
Just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat MAGA authoritarianism. Over the next two years, our task is to send MAGA to the dustbin of history.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the 16,865 Catholics who pledged to vote with consciences formed by the Gospel, and with the tens of thousands who answered Pope Leo’s call to make peace in Iran.
This fall proved that the Church’s social teaching still moves people when someone carries it to them plainly. Human dignity, the migrant at the border, the family paying more for groceries, the child under the bombs: no party platform holds all of them, though every one was on the ballot Tuesday.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that shows up when it counts.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill working to end MAGA authoritarianism and build the common good in its place — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
The turn from Trump has many causes but you have highlighted a number of the important ones: the policies ripping families apart; the blithe turning away from providing access to food and shelter and medical care to the disadvantaged while bragging about how fantastic the economy is performing for those of sufficient means and more; the demonization of the stranger seeking refuge and the exaltation of war, destroying fishing boats outside US waters among other acts that are in no way pro-life or in accord with the Gospels.
I’m not a Catholic but I’m a follower of Pope Leo because he speaks the words of Jesus so clearly and simply.