Washington (CNN)The fight to win over swing Catholic voters in the presidential election has intensified as Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill battle over confirming President Donald Trump’s conservative nominee to the Supreme Court.
Advocates of the President argue he’s earned the Catholic vote by supporting policies that restrict access to abortion, while Biden supporters insist Catholics are multi-issue voters and say Trump’s divisive policies and rhetoric make him undeserving of Catholic support.
Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court could give a boost to his reelection campaign, which has lagged behind Biden’s in national and key swing state polls. Many Republicans are energized by the prospect of cementing a conservative majority on the court, which could enact sweeping changes across the nation on issues including health care, abortion, voting and gun rights.
Catholics are a large, diverse constituency and have tended to back the winner of presidential elections. The key swing voting bloc is split down the middle politically among registered voters and divided along racial and ethnic lines. Trump won White Catholics by a 23-point margin over Hillary Clinton in 2016, while Hispanic Catholics backed Clinton over Trump by a 41-point margin. Trump won Catholics overall by 7 points.
Biden is a practicing Roman Catholic, and if elected, he would be only the second Catholic to become President of the United States; John F. Kennedy was the first in 1960. Biden regularly attends mass and has spoken about how his faith helped him cope after the death of his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash, and losing his son Beau five years ago to brain cancer.
Sister Simone Campbell leads the “Nuns on the Bus,” a group of politically active nuns who have been advocating for liberal policies since at least 2012. They are urging Catholic voters not to cast a ballot for Trump because they say his “policies and demeanor violate every tenet of Catholic social teaching.”
Campbell is the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, a group that recently told its members, “Catholics cannot be true to their faith and vote for Donald Trump in November.” The statement was the first of its kind in the group’s nearly 50-year history. More than 50 nuns are part of the “Nuns on the Bus” campaign, which is hosting virtual events in 56 swing state communities.
Campbell said Trump’s immigration policy, his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and his efforts to take away health care protections from Americans with pre-existing conditions, make the choice this November a “moral issue, and therefore we had to stand up.”
She quoted Pope Francis: “A good Catholic meddles in politics.”
Campbell said Catholics, like most voters, “worry about health care, they worry about the economy, they worry about staying well in this Covid-19 crisis, and they worry about caring for those who are at the margins of our society.”
In the group’s recent kickoff of their virtual bus tour to battleground states, Campbell said “for too long, Catholics have been pigeon-holed as if they only cared about” abortion.
A recent Pew Research Center poll shows White Catholics prefer Trump over Biden by eight percentage points — 52% say they would vote for Trump or are leaning toward Trump, and 44% favor Biden. But that gap has narrowed significantly since August, when Pew put out a poll that showed Trump was 19 points ahead of Biden (59% to 40%).
Source: Trump and Biden vie for Catholic voters amid Supreme Court battle
