Democrats Faced Christian Voter Reckoning in 2024

As the liberal establishment continues its post-mortem of last month’s decisive Democrat losses, one critical factor behind their defeat has largely slipped through the cracks. This omission has allowed both Democrats and their media allies to sidestep accountability for one of their most egregious political errors and morally reprehensible habits: their relentless war on Christians and Americans of faith.

According to Election Day exit polling from CNN, Donald Trump won the Christian vote by an overwhelming margin – a reflection of both the Harris campaign’s hostility towards the faith and the extent to which the Trump campaign’s messaging resonated with believers.

Among Catholics, CNN found that Trump won 59 percent of the vote compared to Kamala Harris’s 39 percent—a stunning 20 percent margin that reflects a notable improvement over Trump’s performance with Catholics in 2020, when he carried just 47 percent of the group compared to Joe Biden’s 52 percent.

Likewise, among Protestants and other Christians, Trump won 63 percent of the vote compared to Harris’s 36 percent—a bump over his 60 percent to 39 percent margin over Biden four years ago.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, easily carried the “no religious affiliation” sect of voters by a margin of 65 percent to Trump’s 31 percent.

To anyone who has paid attention to the Biden-Harris administration’s war on Christians over the last four years, these numbers will not come as a surprise.

From virtually the moment Joe Biden swore the oath of office, the Biden-Harris regime has routinely demonstrated hostility toward religious freedom and traditional expressions of faith. Over the past four years, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice has persecuted pro-life activists, allowed pro-abortion groups to vandalize churches and harass Christians, and even smeared Catholics who participate in the Latin Mass as “extremist threats.”

Additionally, under Biden and Harris, Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill supported legislation that would allow men to compete in women’s sports, force Catholic churches to host same-sex wedding receptions, and force the closure of Catholic adoption and foster care programs.

Biden and Harris have also openly embraced the Democrat Party’s radical position of abortion-on-demand, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church outlines as “gravely contrary to the moral law.” The Biden administration likewise openly supported far-left gender ideology, which the Vatican recently denounced in a wide-ranging document as amounting to “grave violations of human dignity.”

But this is just the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration’s unprecedented war on Catholics and other Americans of faith.

As a Senator, Kamala Harris introduced the so-called “Do No Harm Act,” which would compel Catholic doctors to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs and perform abortions and transgender surgeries on patients. She has also been an avid supporter of the so-called “Equality Act,” which enshrines far-left gender ideology in federal law.

During her time in the Senate, Harris faced massive criticism for launching personal attacks on the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal and charity organization and an esteemed presence within virtually every Catholic parish. Specifically, Harris strongly insinuated that American Catholics—and ostensibly every American of faith—are not fit to serve as federal judges. In 2018, when questioning Brian Buescher—a nominee to be a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska—Harris, in her capacity as a Senator, pointed to his membership in the Knights as problematic, condemning the organization’s (and the Church’s) long-held views as extremist.

These lines of questioning from Harris and other senators were so startling that they brought even prominent secular figures—including the president of Princeton University—to speak out. In September 2017, Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber issued an unprecedented letter to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging them to “refrain from interrogating nominees about the religious or spiritual foundations of their jurisprudential views.” The president of the University of Notre Dame, the Harvard Law Review, and the Anti-Defamation League echoed Eisgruber’s sentiment, also releasing statements slamming the rhetoric.

And to top it all off, in the campaign’s final weeks, Kamala Harris became the first presidential nominee of a major party to sit out the legendary Al Smith Dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984. She insinuated that believers in Jesus Christ were not welcome at her rallies. And Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), one of her top campaign surrogates, openly mocked the Holy Eucharist in a viral social media post, pretending to distribute Holy Communion to a left-wing podcaster in kneeling position—using a Dorito chip as a stand-in for the Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat.

To showcase Democrats’ stark anti-Catholic record, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, a conservative Super PAC ran TV ads in five crucial Senate races that took two minutes of airtime to catalogue a series of moves by Senate Democrat candidates against Catholics—a messaging strategy that almost certainly resonated with Catholic voters as they made their way to the polls.

By every account, Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s war on Christians came back to bite them in dramatic fashion this Election Day. Yet, there has been little indication that Democrats have grappled with or otherwise come to terms with this reality.

If the Democrat Party establishment ultimately heeds the lessons of the last four years, learns from its mistakes, and once again welcomes Americans of faith into its ranks, they will likely find that they can compete against Republicans in future elections. But if they continue to look the other way and escalate their streak of anti-Christian bigotry and persecution, Democrats may soon learn that they have confined themselves to a permanent electoral minority.

Despite years of left-wing efforts to exile Christians from the public square and stymie their political influence, this election proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Christians’ political power is stronger than ever.

When all is said and done, the 2024 election will forever be etched in history as the moment Christians reclaimed their political voice and proudly recaptured their cultural prowess. And as Democrats continue their post-election autopsy, they would be well-served to remember a simple truth: Americans of faith are not going anywhere.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.