Catholics have long been a swing vote in president

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Catholics have long been a swing vote in presidential elections, and right now they’re swinging hard for Clinton.

C'mon Fitz, you KNOW that the righties aren't going to click on a link to yet another article that bursts their fact impervious bubbles.

They've got a lot of this to look forward too though!



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w...c-problem/

It’s also hard to overstate just how significant Trump’s poor performance among Catholics is. That’s because they comprise about one-quarter of voters in the United States (25 percent in 2012 exit polls) and are about as big a voting bloc as non-whites (28 percent) and independents (29 percent).

While we often look at how Trump is doing worse than Romney among Hispanics, we’re really talking about the difference between Trump taking 45 percent of the vote and 46 percent — or maybe 49.5 percent or 50.5 percent. That’s because Hispanics are only about 10 percent of the electorate, and the GOP’s share of that vote is likely to be between 20 and 35 percent or so.

When talking about Catholics, though, Trump is basically adding 5 to 7 percentage points to Clinton’s overall margin. If 25 percent of the electorate is Catholic, Clinton is currently taking 14 to 15 points worth of that chunk, while Trump is taking 8 or 8.5 points. And this is a group, again, that is usually close to tied.

The reasons for Trump’s struggles among this group are open to interpretation. Perhaps Pope Francis’s criticism of Trump and Trump’s surprisingly confrontational response have turned off Catholics to Trump’s candidacy.

While this contemporary strain of old xenophobia is particularly felt by Latinos who increasingly are the face of the Catholic Church in the United States, many white Catholics surely take pride in family stories of grandparents and great-grandparents who were strangers in a new land. Trump has dug himself a deep hole he is unlikely to climb out of with these voters.

But whatever the cause, Trump’s struggles among Catholics remains one of the really undersold story lines of the 2016 election.

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