Vice President Kamala Harris’ failure to appeal to Catholic voters could cost her this election’s most critical swing state, according to a former Bush administration official.
On Monday, both Harris and former President Donald Trump campaigned in Pennsylvania, as they seek to secure the Keystone State’s 19 Electoral College votes. While the vice president has a 0.7-point lead in Pennsylvania, according to 538, her campaign’s focus on abortion may risk alienating one of the state’s most critical demographics.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
According to Pew Research Center’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, 24 percent of Pennsylvanians identified as Catholic. In 2020, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, citing the Official Catholic Directory, put that figure at 23 percent—meaning that of the state’s 13 million residents, about 3 million are Catholic.
McGurn, who served as President George W. Bush‘s chief speechwriter from 2006 to 2008, said Harris’ campaign “gaffes” and her political record could see her lose the group and the state as whole, which Biden won narrowly in 2020.
Newsweek has contacted the Harris campaign for comment on McGurn’s article.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, at a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena in Pennsylvania on October 14. According to Bush administration speechwriter William Mcgurn, the Catholic vote could cost Harris Pennsylvania.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
McGurn noted that as California’s attorney general, Harris opposed religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby, after the Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that the company should be exempt from an Obamacare mandate requiring companies to include contraception in employee health policies.
While serving as a senator in 2018, Harris was also critical of Senate Judiciary Committee nominee Brian Buescher’s membership of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service order named after Christopher Columbus that promotes traditional Catholic stances on issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
Harris later co-sponsored the Equality Act, legislation that McGurn said had drawn intense criticism from national Catholic organizations for its supposedly pro-abortion policy implications.
The vice president’s campaign website said, “As President, she’ll fight to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.”
McGurn wrote: “Though Joe Biden also found himself crosswise with the Catholic Church on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, his Scranton, Pa., roots and familiarity with the culture meant he could overcome that.”
Biden, a Pennsylvania native and the first Catholic president since John F. Kennedy, secured 52 percent of Catholic voters in 2020, according to Edison exit polls, and he won the state by fewer than 100,000 votes.
According to an early October poll of Catholic voters conducted by Mercury Analytics for the National Catholic Reporter, Trump holds the Catholic vote in five of the seven swing states, with Harris maintaining a slight edge in Pennsylvania and a 6-point lead in Nevada.
Do you have a story we should be covering? Do you have any questions about this article? Contact LiveNews@newsweek.com.
