Page 21 - The Economist USA

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The Economist April 25th 2020
Catholic voters
Cathechismic
WASHINGTON, DC
The president’s re-election campaign makes its pitch to Catholic voters
he trump campaign’s big push to woo
TCatholics, who helped elect the presi-
dent in 2016, did not get off to a great start cultural Catholics.
in 2020. Even before the kick-off rally for
“Catholics for Trump”, scheduled for mid-
March, became one of the first political ca-
sualties of social distancing, a high-profile
church leader in an important swing state
had given the outfit a gentle kicking. On
learning that the organisation was plan-
ning to launch in his city, Archbishop Je-
rome Listecki of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
who had previously criticised the presi-
dent’s immigration policies, declared that
the church was “in no way affiliated to or
sponsoring this event or campaign, locally,
statewide or nationally”.
That is unlikely to deter the organisers
of Catholics for Trump, which was
launched this month as a mostly digital ef-
fort. The group, whose advisory board in-
cludes Newt Gingrich, a prominent conser-
vative convert, is not trying to reach all
Catholics. That is because there is no ho-
mogenous “Catholic vote” in America.
Rather, members of the country’s single
biggest religious group vote along a hotch-
potch of social and demographic lines.
Most notably, African-American and His-
panic Catholics lean Democratic while
white Catholics lean Republican.
The president’s desire to appeal to white
Catholics is especially pressing because
they constitute a crucial constituency in
the rustbelt states he won by a narrow mar-
gin in 2016. Nationally, Catholics consti-
tute 22% of the population. In Wisconsin,
which Mr Trump won by around 20,000
votes, 1.7m people—29% of the population
is Catholic. Pennsylvania, which Mr Trump
won by fewer than 50,000 votes, has 3.6m
Catholics. Though whites will soon be a
minority among American Catholics, they
are a strong majority in these states.
Mr Trump cannot rely on their support.
White Catholics vote Republican by a
smaller margin than white Protestants do.
Some heavily Catholic counties in rustbelt
states that voted Republican in 2016 did so
for the first time. They could flip back.
The president’s courtship of Catholics is
made more urgent by the fact that he will
face one in November. Joe Biden makes fre-
quent allusions to his Catholicism on the
trail—especially when he is in areas with
significant Catholic populations—includ-
ing to his Catholic schooling, his fondness
for nuns, and the succour his faith has giv-
en him in personal tragedy. That could play
well with both devout and non-observant
Yet the Trump campaign hopes that the
chief issue on which it means to appeal to
Catholics—abortion—will also be its most
powerful weapon against Mr Biden. The
transformation of the president, who in
1999 described himself as “very pro-
choice,” into an anti-abortion warrior has
endeared him to some Catholic groups that
once criticised him. CatholicVote.org,
which in 2016 condemned Mr Trump after
the release of footage in which he boasted
of groping women, is mobilising Catholics
to vote for him. Tim Huelskamp, a former
Republican congressman from Kansas,
who is involved with both organisations,
says that while some areas of church teach-
ing require interpretation, when it comes
to abortion, “the teaching is the policy”.
Another high-profile anti-abortion cru-
sader in Catholics for Trump is Frank Pa-
vone, a priest and national director of
Priests for Life, who in 2016 posted a video
on social media in which he asked for votes
for Mr Trump while standing behind an al-
tar on which he had claimed to have placed
the body of an aborted fetus. Mr Biden, by
contrast, has a nuanced view of abortion:
he dislikes it but does not want to make it
illegal. This has earned him criticism on
both sides of the abortion debate.
Drive-thru confession
United States 21
Though the former vice-president has
said he supports Roe v Wade, the Supreme
Court ruling which in 1973 made abortion a
constitutional right, he has, for most of the
past four decades, supported the Hyde
Amendment, which bans the use of federal
money for abortions. In 2019, to align him-
self with an ever more progressive Demo-
cratic Party, he changed his mind on
that—a reversal Catholics for Trump is
keen to exploit. During its online launch,
Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House
communications adviser, described Mr Bi-
den as “an extremist” on abortion.
Yet abortion may not be quite the
clinching issue for Catholics that Mr
Trump hopes. Catholic Republican politi-
cians and the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops (usccb) paint it as a vot-
ing issue of singular importance. But even
within the church hierarchy there is dis-
agreement about that. At a recent meeting
of the usccb, a row broke out after a liberal
group of bishops argued that its character-
isation of abortion as the “pre-eminent” is-
sue” (not official church teaching) should
be scrapped from its voter-guidance docu-
ment. Though the guide does not tell Cath-
olics how to vote, its emphasis on abortion,
echoed by many priests from the pulpit,
can look like a nudge to vote Republican.
Presidential absolution
The row illustrates the two strains in the
American church: one that emphasises
personal morality, chiefly characterised by
opposition to gay marriage and abortion,
and another, promoted by Pope Francis,
that focuses on issues of social justice, like
the plight of immigrants. The strength of
both traditions in America means that
Catholics minded to follow church teach-
ing could vote for either party.
In fact, when it comes to voting, few
Catholics pay much heed to what their
church tells them, even on abortion. When
asked by researchers from Public Religion
Research Institute if they would plump for
a candidate who shared their views on
abortion, less than one-quarter of white
Catholics or Hispanic Catholics said they
would do so.
In a closely fought battle, that minority
could make a critical difference. But it also
suggests that the appeal of Mr Trump for
white Catholics is not so very different
from his appeal for other white Americans.
The online chat that constituted Catholics
for Trump’s launch suggested as much. It
began with a discussion about how well Mr
Trump was tackling “the Chinese coronavi-
rus” and progressed to an analysis of how
the president’s values, exemplified in his
immigration policies, which protected
families and neighbourhoods, were in fact
“Catholic values”. Mr Biden might also
claim to represent Catholic values, albeit
rather different ones. 7