After giving a definitive majority to Republican Donald J. Trump in 2024, Catholic voters split almost evenly between the two major parties in this week’s midterm elections, according to exit polls conducted by NBC News and other organizations in 45 states during this year’s voting period. 

Among the respondents to the exit polls, 50 percent of Catholics said they voted for Democratic candidates, and 49 percent said they voted for Republicans. This could represent a significant swing to the left since the last presidential election, when Mr. Trump claimed 55 percent of the Catholic vote, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center.

The same exit poll estimated that 59 percent of Protestant voters voted Republican, and 78 percent of those who claim no religion voted Democratic.

As of Wednesday, The New York Times estimated that the Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House this year by about 13 points. This was a 15-point swing toward the Democrats from the results of the last presidential election.

“In many ways, the Catholic vote has become the swing vote in the United States, and that’s really consequential because Catholics are, frankly, everywhere in America,” Ryan Burge, a political data analyst and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told America. 

Mr. Burge characterized the Catholic vote as “soft Republican,” a description he contrasted with evangelical Protestants being “allergic to the idea of voting for Democrats.”

But Mr. Burge does not believe Tuesday’s outcome represents a shift in ideology among the Catholic electorate.

“This is about the economy being bad,” Mr. Burge said. “Let’s be clear. That’s what this whole election’s about. The economy was bad.” (Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, blamed the loss on the war in Iran.)

The NBC exit poll, which allows website users to break the Catholic vote down by further categories, suggests that despite the even split among Catholic voters as a whole on Tuesday, Republicans still performed strongly among certain demographics of Catholic voters. For example, 56 percent of white Catholics voted for Republican candidates, a figure that rises to 63 percent among white Catholics without a college education. And overall, 55 percent of Catholic men voted Republican. (These figures were still being adjusted on the day after the election, and other estimates of how U.S. Catholics voted are sure to appear in the coming weeks.)

But in other categories of U.S. Catholics, the Democratic Party won the vote—in some cases, decisively. Among Hispanic Catholics, 65 percent voted Democratic, and among the much smaller group of Black Catholics, 87 percent voted Democratic. Catholic women gave 54 percent of their votes to Democrats, almost a mirror image of how Catholic men voted.

One of the most noticeable divides among Catholic voters had to do with age. While 53 percent of Catholic voters over 65 voted Republican, 65 percent of Catholic voters under 29 (a group that is significantly more Hispanic) voted for Democrats.

While Mr. Trump was not on the ballot Tuesday, he may have influenced the leftward shift among Catholic voters. A Pew Research Center report published last month found that Catholic voters were souring on Trump—his approval rating among this group, which was at 47 percent when he took office in January 2025, had plummeted to 30 percent. Historically, the popularity of a sitting president has strongly influenced the fortunes of their party during midterm elections. 

Although the Catholic vote was once reliably Democratic—with 80 percent support for John F. Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960—it has moved toward the middle and even to the center-right in recent decades.

“I used to say that America looks like Catholics, and Catholics like America on election day,” Mr. Burge said, citing the 2008 election in which Democratic nominee Barack Obama got an estimated 54 percent of the Catholic vote, almost exactly his percentage of the U.S. electorate overall. 

But Mr. Burge added that the Catholic vote has since trended toward Republicans—especially among white voters.

“They are a seemingly red voting constituency now, and I think that’s really being caught up more in the fact that just white Christians in America are Republicans,” he said.

Will Martino is a Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., fellow at America Media.