Do Catholic women now have a valid reason to support Harris?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 25, 2024

As of late August, a poll by EWTN News / RealClear Opinion Research shows that support for Harris in the American presidential election is growing significantly among Catholics who attend weekly Mass. The results were discussed and analyzed in a wider article in the National Catholic Register (What’s Driving Catholic Support for Kamala Harris?). That Harris leads Trump among “Catholic” (in scare quotes) voters is historically expected, but what has changed is that 48% of Catholic voters who say they “accept all Church teachings and that is reflected in how I live my life” now support Harris, along with 49% who profess belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Given the undecideds, this means that significantly more faithful Catholics support Harris than support Trump. For women voters the gap widens to 19% for Catholics generally, and it is a 2 to 1 margin in favor of Harris among Hispanic Catholics. This is an important development, and it appears to be easily explained by two points suggested in the Register analysis. First, of course, women voters are very wary of the Trump-Vance ticket because both men have an alarming history of demeaning women in either their relationships or their public comments, or both. There is probably no escaping that problem. But second, it would appear that even seriously Catholic voters believe they are no longer morally obliged to support Trump-Vance because that ticket has gone softer on abortion, now supporting resolution of the issue at the state level and also supporting in vitro fertilization, a process which murders countless human persons at the embryonic stage of life.

It was the anticipation of precisely this mindset which on August 27th led Bob Marshall to write Trump: The lesser of two evils is a moral choice, in which he took pains to emphasize the difference between Trump-Vance’s toleration of significant evils and Harris-Walz’s commitment to going beyond even Biden’s zeal for fostering new and far greater evils along with increasingly coercive bureaucratic measures to ensure that everyone goes along. There is, after all, a strong presumption that the widespread recognition of Donald Trump’s extremely boorish personality leaves many voters looking for an excuse not to support him.

Reversing the polling trends

In my opinion, this is the greatest danger faced by the Republicans in the coming election. From the Republican point of view, the most important priority was almost certainly to ensure the successful emergence of a solid alternative to Trump during the course of the primaries. From the first, I have thought it was a crippling deficiency for the party leaders not to have found a way to prevent Trump from once again winning the nomination. A candidate characterized by courtesy, intelligence, and manifest probity would, I believe, have made a big difference for the Grand Old Party. But it was not to be.

I have not changed my opinion that political victories in the United States are now largely beyond any authentically Catholic reach, nor my emphasis on evangelization as both a far more important priority and also the key element in the long road back to a politics of the common good (again, see my analysis in Faith in a time of socio-political disintegration). But it does not take much time and energy both to vote and to vote well. Therefore, this might be a good moment for the American Church to speak clearly and directly on the moral principles we are required to observe in making our voting decisions. It is not a properly moral decision, for example, to choose to vote for candidates who favor far greater evils and have a far more evil track record either because we like the personalities of the Democratic candidates better or because we believe the imperfections of the Republican platform free us from the obligation to avoid supporting the manifestly far greater intrinsically immoral evils advocated by the Democrats.

It may be a legitimate decision to work toward establishing the future prospects of independent candidates or an up-and-coming new political party. It is possible to justify a long game when the possibility of winning a short game is very remote. It is also perfectly moral to pay less attention to politics, if we consider politics at the present moment to be unfruitful, and far more attention to evangelization. But it is not a legitimate moral conclusion to decide that the personal and moral deficiencies of a less “likeable” candidate justify a decision to vote for a more “likeable” candidate whose positions and political goals are significantly and demonstrably far more evil.

A possible episcopal role

It is considerations such as these that make my wife want to put up a lawn sign reading, “Trump ANYWAY.” But since we are here considering polling data that comes from those who attend Mass weekly, and who believe everything the Church teaches, and who grasp the stupendous character of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, we may in this instance also see an opportunity for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to focus its energies not on a particular approach to this or that prudential issue (such as how much immigration to support or how many federal subsidies to endorse) but on the blunt moral demands of the natural law, and on the overwhelming priority to minimize not mere prudential disagreements but absolute moral evils protected and even imposed by law. Vital instruction might be given by either the Committee on Pro-Life Activities under Bishop Michael Burbidge—who has recently issued a statement deploring our current situation and calling for renewed prayer and action in defense of life—or, conceivably, even by the Committee on Doctrine chaired by Bishop Daniel Flores.

The reader may wonder why I mention the Doctrine Committee in connection with politics. It is because good politics is politics which conforms to the natural law, and the Church’s teaching authority extends to everything God has revealed, either through nature or through Scripture and Tradition. The present case may well be one of the most important instances in which the bishops could put their authority to good use, not by taking potentially controversial positions on disputed prudential social issues, but by teaching more clearly on the moral obligation to contain our personal feelings while assessing carefully which of two candidate objectively advocates and intends to implement the greater degree of moral evil.

In the present situation, the USCCB might be able to preach effectively to a choir badly in need of clear instruction and discipline. In an election, a non-essential personality factor may be a deal-breaker when all other things are equal. But we must beware of letting personal feelings interfere with moral judgment. Episcopal intervention might prevent that among committed Catholics, but so can our own clear thinking. When we examine our moral obligations rather than merely consulting our feelings or checking our personal laundry lists of pros and cons, we will all think more clearly. And there is nothing better than clear thinking when it comes to making moral political decisions.