“White evangelical Protestants,” “white evangelical Protestants,” “white evangelical Protestants.”
“Catholic voters,” “Catholic voters,” “Catholic voters.”
World without end, amen.
The closer we get to Election Day 2020, the more we are going to see these terms in the news.
The assumption is that the “Catholic vote” is especially crucial to Democrat Joe Biden, since he is a life-long Catholic who is seeking to become America’s second Catholic in the White House. Meanwhile, journalists continue to be obsessed with President Donald Trump’s popularity among white evangelical Protestants, who played such a crucial role in his rise during the GOP primaries in 2015.
However, if you look at the swing states that put Trump in office, it was clear that Rust Belt Catholics — blue-collar Catholics in particular — were crucial voters four years ago.
During the past couple of years, our own Richard Ostling has been stressing that political-beat reporters really need to get over the whole “white evangelicals” thing and accept that, as is so often the case, Catholic voters will be the key swing voters this time around.
If readers and scribes need more input on that point, please consider this recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette think piece by Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. The blunt headline: “Catholics, not evangelicals, will make or break Trump.” Here is a crucial chunk of that essay:
In 2016, Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — states with heavy concentrations of Catholic voters — by merely 107,000 votes combined. Although since the 1980s the U.S. national vote and the Catholic vote component have tracked very closely to each other in each election cycle, 2016 was an exception: Hillary Clinton handily won the national popular vote and Mr. Trump won the majority of Catholic voters. Exit polls had Mr. Trump holding a 52%-to-45% edge among Catholics.
Two critical things happened that helped Mr. Trump: his populist economic appeals to white working class voters in those key states, and the widely predicted “Latino surge” never materialized.