The “Catholic vote” is powerful, considering it doesn’t really exist

The Church’s ability to bring partisans together in a polarised nation is indispensable.

Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images

I was looking forward to meeting Kamala Harris and Donald Trump at this year’s Al Smith Dinner, which is being held in Manhattan on 17 October. Hosted annually since 1945 in honour of the first Catholic presidential nominee from a major party, the event forces politicians to set aside partisanship for a single evening devoted to raising money for Catholic charities. Alas, one of the two, Harris, has decided to give it a miss.

The snub is an unforced error – and a needlessly joyless move for a Harris campaign supposedly fuelled by joy. But it may also portend the slide into irrelevance of the Catholic vote.

The official explanation is that Harris needs to focus on her campaign in this final stretch, and that she will be stumping in battleground states that day. But much of the media coverage of her decision has focused on the 2016 dinner, at which Trump broke long-standing norms of collegiality and good humour to rip into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton: “Here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics.”

There is also the fact that Harris and her vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, are running an aggressively pro-choice campaign, whereas the Catholic Church is, well, the Catholic Church. As polling suggests, the issue is one of Harris’s and Walz’s most favourable, and the two are hammering the message that a vote for them is the only way to save abortion rights after the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs Wade (even as the Trump campaign can’t run away fast enough from the anti-abortion cause).

But these aren’t compelling enough reasons to skip the event. The Al Smith Dinner – usually televised in an election year – would afford Harris a rare chance to reach a national audience that is neither a debate nor an adversarial media interview. She won’t get many other of those from now until 5 November.

Attendance would also help her underscore the more centrist tack she has taken since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate. Being comfortable in the American centre isn’t just about taking specific policy stances, such as a more hard-nosed approach to crime and immigration. It’s also about a willingness to shake hands with people of faith in what is still very much a religious country, relative to other advanced industrial states.

Besides, we are talking about an audience of New York City Catholics here, not long-bearded, Latin-chanting traditionalists from Steubenville, Ohio. And having sat on the dais in previous years, as I will be this year, I can report that the state and local notables who flank the nominees are overwhelmingly Democrats: the likes of New York governor Kathy Hochul, the state attorney general Tish James, and former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio.

At the 2022 dinner, I was one seat over from Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, and not far from Brad Lander, the city comptroller. Both are arch-progressives whose policy approach I’ve spent years excoriating as the op-ed editor of the New York Post. We took selfies and talked about our private lives. That’s the beauty of the Al Smith Dinner. If Trump were to go vicious again, it would only redound to Harris’s benefit.

Harris’s decision raises questions about the meaning and significance of the Catholic vote. A solidly Democratic bloc through the New Deal era, and especially under the first Catholic president, JFK, Catholic voters have, since the Nixon presidency, been split between the two parties – and along racial and ethnic lines. This led the Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne Jr to quip once that “there is no Catholic vote, and it’s important”.

The split, now a fixture of American political life, has to do with the fact that the Catholic world-view doesn’t line up neatly with either of the two party’s platforms. Catholics are concerned with social-justice issues typically associated with the left and with life-and-family issues that have been domain of the right. Thus, as Dionne wrote, “being a Catholic liberal or a Catholic conservative inevitably means having a bad conscience about something”.

That was then. Today, the share of Americans who identify as Catholic has dropped to 20 per cent, down from 23 per cent in 2009. The Catholic population is greying rapidly, and while an influx of Hispanic migrants keeps the median age from rising even higher, the Catholic share of the Hispanic community is declining, to 47 per cent in 2019, down from 57 per cent a decade earlier.

These demographic realities have been compounded by the self-inflicted wound of the sexual abuse crisis, which diminished the bishops’ authority to guide the politics of their flocks. Meanwhile, working-class, white-ethnic identities – Italian, Irish, Polish – have fallen victim to the same patterns of affluence and suburbanisation affecting American Jews. The result is that Democratic and Republican strategists aren’t crazy to think that they can reach potential Catholic supporters through other aspects of their identity, ones that lie outside their faith.

And yet the Catholic Church’s charitable work and its ability to bring together partisans in an otherwise deeply polarised nation remain indispensable. It’s those virtues the Al Smith Dinner exemplifies. Still time to change your mind, Madam Vice-President!