Celebrate, yes. But also steel yourself for the battles ahead.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 09, 2024

It has been less than a week since President-elect Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris and the dust is still settling. As I review the results and the analyses, the first thing that jumps out at me is the line with which Thomas Mirus opened his biweekly email to Catholic Culture’s subscribers:

I suspect that even many Catholics who chose to vote for, say, the American Solidarity Party rather than for Trump, were relieved at this week’s electoral defeat of pro-abortion, pro-gender-ideology radicalism.

That is exactly right. Almost every faithful Catholic, whether or not they voted for Trump, is breathing a sigh of relief right now. Like many, my gut told me Trump would win. But after the strange election of 2020, I refused to believe it. I thought the polls showing the two candidates to be neck-and-neck were true. I am glad to have been wrong.

What lessons should Catholics draw from the events of this year? Here is Catholic Culture’s Phil Lawler in his must-read take on the election:

During the last few weeks of the presidential campaign, a desperate Kamala Harris warned that the future of American democracy was at stake. She was right—but for the wrong reasons. The danger to our democracy—our republican democracy—was not a Trump dictatorship, but an arrogant liberal elite determined to enforce “woke” ideology on the country…

…once in power the zealots of the “woke” regime threw the full force of law-enforcement against their ideological enemies. Federal SWAT teams burst into the homes of pro-life activists to make arrests for alleged crimes that local authorities had already declined to prosecute. Elderly women were sent to jail for peaceful, prayerful protests at abortion clinics.

Strikingly, the voters saw through it. Catholics saw through it. My column two weeks ago argued that “The stale Catholic debate over voting ignores new threats.” I no longer believe that to be the case. At least not in this election. I think the extraordinary targeting of Catholics by the Biden-Harris Administration is why Catholics voted in the ways recounted by Paul Kengor:

…the Catholic numbers for Trump are extraordinary.

An NBC News exit poll shows that Catholics preferred Trump-Vance over Harris-Walz by a whopping 58%-40% (with Catholics representing 22% of all voters). Among white Catholics, the margin was 61%-35%. The Washington Post exit poll shows a 56%-41% margin.
The state-by-state margins in pivotal swing states are likewise extraordinary.

According to data collected and posted by the organization Catholic Vote, Catholics in Michigan voted Trump-Vance over Harris-Walz by an astounding 20%. In Pennsylvania, Catholics were likewise decisive for Trump, by 14%. In Wisconsin, it was 16%. In North Carolina, 17%. In Florida, the margin was astounding: 29%.

In states where the Trump margin of victory was only 1%-2%, Catholic ballots made the difference. Brian Burch of Catholic Vote put it this way, ‘Catholic voters played a decisive role in the historic victory of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. … These numbers are shocking and could prove to be the largest margin among Catholics in a presidential race in decades.’

Taking a closer look

As Kengor notes, the Catholic vote is normally identical to the national vote overall. Catholics voted against Kamala Harris in disproportionately higher numbers this time because they now know they are being targeted. Contra my article of two weeks ago, they finally know that it is not 2004 anymore.

But that is true in more ways than one. On the surface, 2024 bears a superficial similarity to other Republican years. The left went too far, got too radical, and the country reacted against it. This was a “revenge of the normies” election.

Take a closer look. What passes for “radical” and “normal” has shifted tremendously. In the 1980s, the country was reacting against the cultural excesses of the Vietnam era. As late as 2004, George W. Bush was reelected by “values voters” who were against abortion and same-sex marriage.

Fast-forward to 2024. Trump-Vance got elected in part by gutting the GOP’s commitment to the unborn. Whereas twenty years ago every state voted to protect marriage where it was on the ballot, now every state does the opposite. Forty or fifty years ago the left-to-right converts were such intellectual luminaries as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, Catholics like Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus. Today those figures are Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard. Impressive, accomplished people, to be sure. But all of them are far to the left of the moral consensus that the earlier generation of conservative converts had hoped to restore. They are fine with the destruction of marriage and the killing of the unborn. They just want the Woke to at least stop performing genital mutilation on minors.

That is how far we have fallen. The defeat of the radicalism represented by Kamala Harris is a huge win. We should all rightly breathe a sigh of relief. But it was, at best, a stay-of-execution for Christian morality in the United States. Even as the 2024 election is a rebuke to the left for its excesses, we must acknowledge that the whole country has shifted left. And we must steel ourselves to battle against it. Even, at times, against those whose victories we are rightly celebrating this week.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

Show 4 Comments? (Hidden)Hide Comments

• Posted by: feedback - Nov. 13, 2024 3:15 AM ET USA

  The levels of lawfare, deliberate hoaxes, vitriol and vilification of President Trump must have exceeded anything ever done by the US justice system and the legacy media. And then they still had the hutzpah to call him a "convicted felon." Fortunately, the majority of Americans knew better.

• Posted by: philtech2465 - Nov. 11, 2024 7:21 PM ET USA

  As a faithful Catholic who in fact voted for the American Solidarity Party, and who is passionately pro-life, I was still horrified, not relieved, by Trump's win. Defeating pro-abortion pro-gender-ideology radicalism came at a high price of re-electing a dangerously unstable President who by the way, compromised his pro-life position.

• Posted by: miketimmer499385 - Nov. 11, 2024 2:08 PM ET USA

  Faithful Catholics can be apprehensively happy today for at least staving off the persistent decline of rational scientific and moral life in the US. However, I can only shake my head in wonderment that 40% thereabouts of nominal Catholics would vote for the Democratic Party. It speaks to a woeful lack of education, both civic and religious, within dioceses. Evangelization without recourse to some form of old-timey primary schools is going to be a hill too high to climb. God help us we pray.

• Posted by: Randal Mandock - Nov. 09, 2024 4:47 PM ET USA

  What should one expect when Catholic leadership violated Pope St. JPII's condemnation of proportionalism in "Veritatis Splendor"? They urged Catholics to vote for "the lesser of two evils". WRONG! The proper advice would have been to vote prudently. What would this look like? In my case, I consider the totality of threats facing both the U.S. and the world population. I listed a few of these in comments to your previous article. A vote for Trump was a vote for virtue, his naivete notwithstanding