Trump has no chance of winning the Catholic vote

[rug]

THEOLOGY, DEMOGRAPHICS, AND TRUMP’S OWN WORDS WILL DOOM THE GOP’S EFFORTS WITH CATHOLIC VOTERS IN 2016

JANE COASTON
3h ago

There are nearly 60 million Catholics of voting age in the United States, and Donald Trump wants all of them to vote Republican this fall. On September 21, Trump went so far as to hire Catholic (failed) presidential candidate Rick Santorum to lead a “heavyweight” group of advisors to appeal to the denomination.

There are two problems with that approach: Catholics generally don’t vote Republican, and even if they did, they won’t vote for Trump. Theology, demographics, and Trump’s own words will doom the GOP’s efforts with Catholic voters in 2016.

Collecting just a simple majority of Catholic voters could swing the election toward Trump, especially since the margin of victory in the past two elections has been under 11 million votes. But since 2000, Republican presidential candidates have only won over the demographic once out of the last five elections. Though many Catholics worldwide hold conservative positions on issues like abortion and birth control, the majority of American Catholics don’t. Polling shows that most U.S. Catholics support marriage equality, the use of contraception, and are even in favor of permitting access to abortion in some cases.

Now, it’s true that the more conservative Catholics could, in theory, make an ideal base for Trump. They, unlike the majority of U.S. Catholics, oppose abortion entirely — an issue that forms the basis of much of Trump’s current efforts to appeal to the denomination. Still, they find Trump’s laser-like focus on “doing business” and “winners and losers” unappealing. New polling released this week shows that Trump trails Clinton by 27 points with Catholic voters. Kaya Oakes, an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley who has written extensively on American Catholics, told MTV News that “Catholics seem to be leaning toward Clinton, probably because she leans closer to the social justice values and care for the marginalized message many Catholics heard growing up.”

http://www.mtv.com/news/2937416/trump-has-no-chance-of-winning-the-catholic-vote/