Lost in much of the analysis in the breakdown of the Democrats fall outside of urban areas in the state is the collapse of the party’s competitiveness among catholic voters- particularly non-Hispanic catholic voters over the past eight years. Per exit polling data Democrats have gone from Barack Obama winning the overall catholic vote statewide in 2008 to losing it by five points in 2012 to Hillary Clinton losing it by ten points in 2016. When you split off Hispanic Catholics, Mitt Romney got 62% of Catholic vote in 2012 and Donald Trump about 70% in 2016. Non-Hispanic Catholics in Florida and nationally are voting more and more like white protestants and that should scare every leader in the Democratic Party.
For years, the catholic vote represented a core constituency for Democrats here in Florida, in the industrial Midwest and also in the urban centers of the Northeast. The differences between white catholic voters and white protestant voters was stark but now the two constituencies are voting more and more like one another.
Seeing the collapse of the non-Hispanic Catholic vote for Democrats at the top-of-the-ticket helps explain why the party is on the run in medium-sized counties like Pasco, Marion and Volusia which have a fair amount of white catholic voters particularly Midwestern and Northeastern transplants. These counties are now voting much like parts of non-urban Ohio and Michigan as well as upstate New York. Those areas all share a Republican heritage, but the medium-sized counties of Central and North Central Florida do not share that Republican heritage, but have essentially assumed it over the course of the last six years.
Per the Pew Research Center, the Catholic vote declined 5% nationally for Hillary Clinton in 2016 from President Obama’s 2012 level and nine percent from 2008.
While secularism is a core tenet of the American republic, Democrats have to make appeals to religious voters – if not based on faith on the types of economic issues that appeal to Catholics, long the core of the national Democratic coalition.
The new leadership of the party at both the state and national level must address the decline in vote share Democratic candidates are getting among catholic voters. Otherwise, the party can expect to continue to lose elections for the foreseeable future. This is just another issue to put on the checklist of what party leaders need to address.
In the near future we’ll gather data and try and analyze why white catholic voters and steering clear of the Democrats in Florida.
The Florida Squeeze 
So Democrats should be bigots to get this vote?
Is that what you want?
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In Florida, 58% of Catholics went for Trump, while 53% went for Romney. Again, we do not know the racial breakdown of this vote. One thing that is interesting in the exit polling is that those who identified as Catholic went up by 2% between 2012 and 2016 in Florida, considering many have considered Catholicism a “dying religion”. But what is even more interesting is that those who identify with “no religion” went up from 15% to 17%. Of the “no religion” vote, Democrats lost 14% in Florida!!!
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So was it the pattern of adultery and lewd behavior that won a majority of Catholics? Or Trump’s deep faith in God?
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[…] in the country are voting overwhelmingly Democratic. But those who tend to be religious Christians (as discussed yesterday, this now includes white Catholics which is a dramatic reversal of American electoral history) are voting in larger and larger numbers […]
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The Donald promised good jobs for everybody. We lost the economic message this time around, even tho’ theirs was a lie. Plus, the church out here in the hinterland has adopted the GOP wording that says Dems are pro-abortion. We are pro-choice, but we don’t get that across.
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[…] have lost vote share in bedroom communities up and down I-95 and I-75. We have looked at the increasing difficulty the party has had with catholic voters, particularly white Catholics who until recently favored Democratic candidates (this is no […]
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[…] have lost vote share in bedroom communities up and down I-95 and I-75. We have looked at the increasing difficulty the party has had with catholic voters, particularly white Catholics who until recently favored Democratic candidates (this is no […]
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[…] so coincidentally Florida’s Democrats as we’ve pointed out previously at TFS is doing worse with catholic voters than any time in recent memory)? Why would Democrats abandon a successful previous candidate in a reddish district but whose […]
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[…] have lost vote share in bedroom communities up and down I-95 and I-75. We have looked at the increasing difficulty the party has had with catholic voters, particularly white Catholics who until recently favored Democratic candidates (this is no […]
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