EWTN/RealClear Poll: Majority of Catholics Don't Want Biden or Trump to Run Former President Donald Trump, left and President Joe Biden. (AP)
By Jay Clemons | Monday, 03 October 2022 08:15 PM EDT
A new joint poll from EWTN News and RealClear Opinion reveals nearly 6 in 10 Catholic voters maintain that President Joe Biden, the nation's second Catholic president, should not seek a second term in 2024.
The Catholic voters also expressed similar opposition to former President Donald Trump running for office two years from now.
For this survey, which chronicled the responses of 1,581 Catholic voters over a four-day span (Sept. 12-15), only 22.2% said they favored President Biden — already this nation's oldest president — from pursuing the White House again in 2024.
That figure was nearly tripled by the 58.4% of respondents who prefer Biden retire at the end of his term in January 2025.
Also, nearly 52% of Catholic voters said they either disapproved or strongly disapproved of the president's job performance after 20-plus months in office, with 47% of that subset casting a "strongly disapprove" vote.
On the flip side, 32% of respondents approved of President Biden's work to date, and 14% "strongly approved" of his time in the White House.
Also, just 2% of voters didn't have a substantive opinion on Biden, either way.
Regarding Trump, the EWTN/RealClear findings report that 63.3% of Catholic respondents don't want the 45th president to seek reelection in 2024 — despite being the consensus favorite to secure the Republican Party's 2024 nomination.
Conversely, 26.7% of Catholic respondents support Trump's presumptive presidential bid.
Among the other survey highlights:
- More than 73% of Catholic voters support limiting abortion rights to 15 weeks or less; and just 13.4% of Catholic voters favor abortion up to the moment of birth.
- 67.4% of Catholic voters support public funding for pregnancy resource centers, compared to 18.3% opposing public funding for the centers.
- More than 34% of Catholic voters consider inflation to be "the most important issue facing the nation." The other most-pressing issues involved the U.S. economy (19.7%), abortion rights (10.1%), and immigration (10.1%).
- Nearly 74% of Catholic voters are concerned about the so-called "COVID deficit" theory with schoolchildren, in which the students incurred intellectual and/or social-development deficits during the coronavirus-infused shutdowns of schools across America (2020 and 2021).
- Approximately 60% of Catholic voters oppose introducing Critical Race Theory (CRT) into classrooms, compared to 29% of Catholic voters who support it.
- 75.6% of Catholic voters oppose biological boys, or trans girls, competing on biological girls' sports teams — with particularly high opposition tallies from Hispanic Catholics (77.3%) and Black Catholics (80.3%).
- More than 53% of Catholic voters believe that supporting "transgender ideology" would conflict with Catholic teachings, while 30.3% believe it would not.