President Donald Trump's feud with Pope Leo XIV came back to bite Republicans in a big way, according to a new analysis.
Catholic voters backed Democrats for Congress 50 percent to 49 percent in Tuesday's midterm elections, according to the NBC News exit poll, Christopher Hale wrote Thursday in his Substack newsletter, Letters from Leo.
Two years earlier, the same poll had Catholics favoring Republicans 59 percent to 39 percent, Hale noted, citing Religion News Service. The 21-point swing in the margin arrived in the first midterm since the Chicago native was elected pope.
Catholics accounted for about one in five ballots, according to Hale, who wrote that Democrats won the national House vote by roughly 13 points and recaptured the Senate.
Hale tied the shift to the GOP's open hostility toward the pontiff. In April, Trump branded Leo "weak" on crime and "terrible" on foreign policy, Vice President JD Vance warned him to be careful opining on theology and House Speaker Mike Johnson lectured him on "something called the just war doctrine," Hale wrote.
"Seven months later, Catholic voters had their say," he wrote.
Trump's standing with the group had already cratered by October, when his approval among Catholics sat at 30 percent, down from 47 percent when he returned to office, according to Hale.
Younger and nonwhite Catholics powered much of the change. Citing Will Martino's reporting in America magazine, Hale wrote that Democrats won 65 percent of Hispanic Catholics and 65 percent of Catholics under 29, along with 87 percent of Black Catholics. Catholic women also favored Democrats, while white Catholics and Catholic men still tilted Republican.
Vance, a Catholic convert, blamed the Republican collapse on the war in Iran, Hale wrote, while Washington University political scientist Ryan Burge told America the economy was the culprit. Hale argued both were describing the same break, pointing out that Leo spent the year urging Americans to end the war while the White House waved him off.
Hale cautioned that exit polls are early estimates and the Catholic figure could shift by a point or two once voter-file studies come in. But he argued no such adjustment would wipe out a move of that size.
He ended with a rallying cry. "Just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat MAGA authoritarianism," Hale wrote. "Over the next two years, our task is to send MAGA to the dustbin of history."