It should come as no surprise that, in an election in which he won at least a plurality of the popular vote, Donald Trump also won a majority of the Catholic vote. American Catholics have favored the candidate who ultimately won the popular vote in every presidential contest since 1972 — with the lone exception of 2016.
Catholics voted for Nixon, Carter, Reagan (twice), Bush, Clinton (twice), Gore, Bush, Obama (twice), Trump, Biden, and Trump (again). So consistently does the Catholic vote track the popular vote in national elections that it has become something of a truism to say, as E. J. Dionne did, way back in 2000, that “the Catholic vote doesn’t exist.” There just doesn’t appear to be anything distinctively Catholic about how American Catholics vote.
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