From CNA:
The Catholic vote on Tuesday broke for former President Donald Trump by a large margin nationwide and within swing states in the 2024 presidential election, according to exit polls published by the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and NBC News.
According to the Washington Post’s exit poll, Trump won the national Catholic vote by a 15-point margin: 56% to 41%. This shows a much larger victory for Trump among Catholic voters than the Post’s 2020 exit polls, which showed Trump with only a five-point lead above President Joe Biden, 52% to 47%.
The shift represents a 10-point swing in favor of Trump from 2020 to 2024.
The Washington Post poll also found that 69% of voters who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases voted for Harris, but Trump managed to win 28% of voters who held the same view.
Abortion was on the ballot in several states, and seven states voted to protect or expand the ability to obtain an abortion:
Constitutional amendments to protect or expand abortion passed in seven of the 10 states where they appeared on the ballot Tuesday, NBC News projects.
Voters in Arizona and Missouri approved ballot initiatives that will effectively protect abortion rights until fetal viability and undo existing abortion laws on the books. But voters in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota rejected proposed amendments that would have done the same — becoming the first pro-abortion-rights ballot measures to fail since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Meanwhile, voters in Maryland, Montana, Nevada and New York (where abortion is already legal through fetal viability) and in Colorado (where there are no laws restricting abortion and no gestational limits for women seeking abortions), passed measures that will formally enshrine those existing rights. Organizers have said the amendments are designed to prevent lawmakers from undoing existing protections in the future.
In Nebraska, two dueling abortion-related measures were on the general election ballot. The one voters approved will protect abortion rights in the first trimester while barring the procedure in the second and third trimesters, except in medical emergencies or when pregnancies are the result of sexual assaults or incest. Passage effectively codifies the state’s existing law banning abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions, in the state constitution.
The other amendment, that would have enshrined abortion rights until fetal viability in the conservative state’s constitution, was rejected.
The defeats of the amendments in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota ended what had been an unbroken winning streak for ballot measures backing abortion rights in the 2½ years since the fall of Roe.
