The 2024 catholic latinos' red shift
Abstract
The 2024 presidential election was again one of the most contentious in U.S. history, with nearly 156 million ballots cast and a turnout rate of 63.8%. Donald Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote and his opponent 48.3%. What is most striking about the 2024 presidential election is that the Democratic candidate, President Joe Biden, somewhat unexpectedly dropped out of the race in July 2024. He was replaced by then Vice President Kamala Harris, an African American and Asian American woman from California. She chose Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, a Lutheran who was raised Catholic, as her running mate. For the Republicans, Donald J. Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running mate, a one-term senator from Ohio and a person who converted to Catholicism in 2019. With a change of candidate so late in the race, the 2024 presidential election was like no other in modern history. Despite being the vice-president, Kamala Harris was fairly unknown on the national stage and only had three months to campaign. In the end, she fared much worse than Joe Biden did in 2020 in almost all demographic categories. One of the most alarming trends for the future of the Democratic coalition was the drop in the Latino vote, which was explained, in part, by a conjoined precipitous decline in both the Catholic vote and the Latino vote.