Catholics have historically been a major factor in elections, and the 2026 midterms were no different, with polls showing that they were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
The exit polls conducted by NBC News showed that 50 percent of Catholics voted for Democrats in the 2026 midterms, while 49 percent voted for Republicans. This marks a significant shift from the 2024 election, when Catholics swung for Trump at 55 percent, according to the the Pew Research Center. Roughly 59 percent of self-identified Protestants voted for Republicans, while 78 percent with no religious affiliation voted for Democrats.
Speaking to America Magazine, Ryan Burge, a political data analyst and professor at Washington University in St. Louis said that the results show Catholic voters are the swing vote to capture, characterizing them as “soft Republican.”
“In many ways, the Catholic vote has become the swing vote in the United States, and that’s really consequential because Catholics are, frankly, everywhere in America,” said Burge.
“This is about the economy being bad,” Burge added. “Let’s be clear. That’s what this whole election’s about. The economy was bad.”
The polls did, however, show that Catholic voters were diverse in how they voted when broken down into specific demographics, per America:
For example, 56 percent of white Catholics voted for Republican candidates, a figure that rises to 63 percent among white Catholics without a college education. And overall, 55 percent of Catholic men voted Republican. (These figures were still being adjusted on the day after the election, and other estimates of how U.S. Catholics voted are sure to appear in the coming weeks.)
But in other categories of U.S. Catholics, the Democratic Party won the vote—in some cases, decisively. Among Hispanic Catholics, 65 percent voted Democratic, and among the much smaller group of Black Catholics, 87 percent voted Democratic. Catholic women gave 54 percent of their votes to Democrats, almost a mirror image of how Catholic men voted.
Catholic voters under the age of 29 swung heavily for the Democrats at 65 percent, while 53 percent of Catholic voters above age 65 voted Republican.
As to why the Catholic vote split with an edge toward Democrats, explanations range from the state of the economy to immigration to overall dissatisfaction with President Trump’s policies. In states like Michigan, for instance, the organization Catholic Vote withdrew its endorsement for Republican Mike Rogers after his campaign issued a pro-choice ad.
