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Donald Trump won the Catholic vote in 2024 by twelve points, 55 percent to Kamala Harris’s 43 percent, according to Pew’s study of validated voters. Four years earlier, the same group had split almost evenly.
Six days before the midterms, Pew now finds that only 30 percent of American Catholics approve of the job he is doing.
The new survey, fielded from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4 among 5,062 adults, puts his Catholic approval 17 points below the 47 percent he held at the start of his term in early 2025. Two in three Catholics (67 percent) now disapprove. Gregory Smith, who wrote Pew’s analysis, noted that even Trump’s most loyal religious groups see him “less favorably than they used to.”
Right after the 2024 election, I wrote in Newsweek that Harris lost Catholic voters because she never tried to win them. She skipped the Al Smith Dinner and sent a video instead, while Trump’s campaign ran ads aimed squarely at Catholics in the battleground states.
I republished that piece here last July with a roadmap for winning those voters back. Two years later, the president is giving them away.
A slow leak, then a break
For most of his first year back in office, the decline came gradually. Trump’s approval among Catholics fell to 42 percent by April 2025 and bounced around the low 40s through the summer and fall; by January 2026 it sat at 39 percent.
White Catholics, his strongest Catholic constituency, even rallied to 56 percent in September before settling at 52 percent in January.
On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel struck Iran, and Pope Leo XIV used his Angelus the next morning to plead for an end to the violence.
Since then, Trump’s Catholic approval has fallen another nine points, from 39 percent to 30. With white Catholics the slide runs steeper: 13 points, from 52 percent to 39, nearly double what he lost with them over his entire first year.
Pew cannot tell us why any single Catholic changed her mind. It seems clear to me, though, that the war was the turning point. The Iran war broke the MAGA Catholic coalition at the seam, as I wrote in March, setting the populist Catholic right against itself over Israel and the morality of the bombing campaign.
Pete Hegseth framed the war in the language of a Christian crusade. The pope answered from St. Peter’s Square, Sunday after Sunday.
On Palm Sunday, a month into the war, Leo turned the prophet Isaiah on the men claiming God for it. In his homily in St. Peter’s Square, the pope said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” CNN aired the moment:
Then Trump made the fight personal. In May he claimed Leo wanted Iran armed with a nuclear weapon and said the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics.”
A month later, Pew found that 78 percent of American Catholics view Leo favorably. Given a fight between their president and their pope, most Catholics sided with the pope.
The Latino Catholic collapse
The steepest fall belongs to Hispanic Catholics, who make up 36 percent of the American Church. Roughly four in ten of them voted for Trump in 2024, a gain of about ten points over 2020 that helped carry him to his Catholic majority (a PRRI post-election survey found the same rightward shift). Today just 18 percent approve of his job performance, and 78 percent disapprove.
That 18 percent ties the lowest figure Pew has recorded for him among Hispanic Catholics in this term, down from 31 percent in early 2025. It shows up on the ballot, too. Hispanic Catholic voters favor Democrats for the House by 59 percent to 19, a forty-point margin.
Hispanic Catholics have watched the deportation campaign from up close.
A study cited by OSV News found that more than one in six American Catholics are either vulnerable to deportation or could see a family member deported.
Leo has spent his pontificate defending those families, and in September his cardinal in Washington, Robert McElroy, preached on the Good Samaritan to indict Trump’s war on immigrants. Leo himself spent the Fourth of July on Lampedusa, the Italian island where boats of migrants from Africa land.
White Catholics still prefer Republicans for the House, 50 percent to 32. Across the whole Church, though, Catholic voters now lean Democratic, 42 to 39. Two years ago, this same flock handed Trump a twelve-point win.
The worst possible map
The timing could hardly be worse for the White House, and neither could the geography. Catholics make up about one in five American adults, but they cluster in the places that will decide who controls Congress.
A Newsweek analysis in April put the Catholic share near 32 percent in New Jersey and 31 percent in New York, where Republicans Tom Kean Jr. and Mike Lawler are defending competitive seats. In Pennsylvania, three Republican incumbents sit on the battleground list: Brian Fitzpatrick in the Philadelphia suburbs, Ryan Mackenzie in the Lehigh Valley, and Rob Bresnahan in a northeastern Pennsylvania seat built around Scranton, Joe Biden’s Catholic hometown. Derrick Van Orden’s western Wisconsin district and Tom Barrett’s seat around Lansing are on the same list.
The Latino Catholic numbers matter most in South Texas, where Republicans redrew the map last year on the theory that Trump’s 2024 gains with Hispanic voters would last. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez is defending one of those redrawn seats.
A new report for Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, described undecided Catholics as “swing voters in the truest sense of the term” who reliably show up to vote.
If you are a Catholic in one of these districts, or anywhere else in the country, take the Pope Leo voter pledge before Tuesday. It is a promise to vote on or before Nov. 3 with a conscience formed by the Gospel and by the Church’s care for every person made in the image of God.
Whose image
Catholics do not belong to a party, and they never have. Leo said as much in September, when he told the faithful that “we cannot remain as unengaged spectators” in public life. On Sunday, the day after he left the hospital, he preached on Caesar’s coin and reminded us whose image we carry.
And on Tuesday, still recovering from lung surgery, he told the world’s religious leaders that “there is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy.”
Millions of American Catholics seem to have heard him. Trump promised in 2024 to defend their faith. Two years on, Catholics have watched him wage a war in God’s name and deport members of their own parishes, and the numbers show they noticed.
Next Tuesday, they get their say.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the millions of American Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who refuse to let any war, or any party, borrow the name of God.
A Church that teaches every person carries the image of God cannot shrug when a government bombs in that name or tears migrant families out of the pews. The faithful are not a voting bloc to be collected every four years. They are a people with a conscience, and this fall that conscience is speaking.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth in public, and right now, six days before the first national election of Leo’s pontificate, that hunger has never been more urgent.
Before you vote, read our 2026 Catholic voter guides, which set the candidates in the closest Senate, governor, and House races beside the teaching of Popes Leo and Francis. If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a politics of war and fear — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
It was disgusting that he had that much Catholic support in 2024.
I can't believe that Any Catholic Christians would support trump. I can't believe that anyone who calls themselves Christian, meaning followers of Christ and his teachings would even toy with the idea that he is one to be followed 😳