WASHINGTON — Catholic voters shifted toward Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections after supporting President Donald Trump by a wide margin just two years earlier, initial exit polls show.
Initial exit polls of 2026 midterm voters conducted by NBC News in coordination with a group of other news organizations found 50% of respondents who described themselves as Catholic said they supported Democrats, and 49% said Republicans.
Ryan Burge, author of the Substack newsletter “Graphs about Religion” and a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, told OSV News the early data shows “definitely a bit of reversal” among Catholic voters.
“That’s notable because the trend has been toward the Republicans the last couple of election cycles. For instance, they were 55% for Trump in 2024,” he said.
Previous election data shows most Catholic voters supported Trump in 2024, where he carried 55% of the Catholic vote, while former Vice President Kamala Harris carried just 43%.
In previous elections, majorities of Catholic voters supported Al Gore in 2000, George W. Bush in 2004, Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 before supporting Trump again in 2024.
Those shifts, Burge said, show that “Catholics aren’t a ‘locked in’ voting bloc.”
“Some Catholics will vote for a Republican in one election, then a Democrat in the next. They are much more malleable than evangelicals, for instance,” he said.
The shift in Catholic voters came amid a landslide election for Democrats, who were projected to win an 83-seat majority in the U.S. House, with estimates of 259 Democratic seats and 176 Republican seats as of Nov. 9.
The party picked up Senate seats in typically Republican strongholds of Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, and Iowa. Democratic candidates also won a sweep of races that were seen as competitive in North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, and Maine.
Senate races in Mississippi and Alaska were still too close to call as of Nov. 9.
In Texas, the scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton — whom Trump supported in his primary challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn — went on to lose the general election to his Democratic rival, state Rep. James Talarico, marking the first Senate victory for Democrats in the Lone Star State since 1994.
Burge pointed to Texas as an example of a place where a shift in Catholic voters may have had a large impact.
“I think we will be doing a lot of analysis in Texas in the months to come,” Burge said. “Talarico won by 13 points, which is astonishing. And that couldn’t have happened without a whole lot of subgroups shifting to the left, including Catholics.”
Michael Moreland, a professor of law and religion at Villanova University and director of its Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, told OSV News that in addition to Texas, Catholic voters also likely had an impact on House races in Ohio, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, among others.
“It’s not like the Catholic vote was, I think, a determining factor in any of those places on its own, but as part of a larger trend of some anger and disaffiliation of especially white voters away from the Republicans,” he said.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted prior to the election found that among all Catholics, Trump’s approval rating had dropped from 47% at the beginning of his second term to 30% in October 2026.
Prior to the election, analysts who spoke with OSV News about the Pew survey previously pointed to two unique factors — in addition to the broader general trends — that may have pushed Catholic voters away from Trump: some of the immigration policies Trump has implemented that Catholic leaders have objected to, and Trump’s social media and verbal attacks on Pope Leo earlier this year.
“I do think that in some places you saw some worries about some of the perceived cruelty in immigration enforcement,” Moreland said. “I think that was of concern in a lot of parts of the Catholic community.”
Those elected to the 120th U.S. Congress are scheduled to be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027.
