The 2024 presidential election ended up a bit closer than initially perceived.

The winner received 49.9 percent of the vote.

With final votes still being tallied, it appears that Donald J. Trump beat Kamala Harris by about 1.6 percentage points, or 2,528,598 votes.

Consider that by our estimate, the Catholic vote was fifteen percent higher for the Republican than in the last election, which by one calculation, means 3.1 million more voted for President-elect Trump than in 2020.

That’s more than Trump’s margin of victory, such that Catholics can argue that they won the election for him.

It was the mouse–Catholics–who roared.

One uses the word metaphor of a mouse because Catholics are just twenty percent of the populace and, though that’s a sizable figure, often are all but ignored.

Not this time. Perhaps not for quite a while.

The reasons were many, starting perhaps with the economy but no doubt also Harris’s promises to make Catholic hospitals perform abortion, her constant vow for abortions right up to birth, and the whole “identity” thing–transgenders leading story time for kids at a public library, for instance, multiple gender classifications (“non-binary”?), or tampons in men’s rooms–no doubt had a huge, unspoken influence.

As governor of Minnesota, her running mate had signed a law that requires schools to provide access to menstrual products such as pads, tampons, or other similar period products “in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district.”

It is difficult to visualize that being done with a straight face.

Shame on you, Minnesota.

Nor did it help that Harris skipped the customary Catholic Al Smith Dinner.

But the big thing is general morality. There is now the chance that school prayer will be reinstituted, the Ten Commandments now publicly displayed (at least more than now), and Catholics will be allowed vouchers if they want to send their children to a Catholic school.

Will Disney now not take a second look at some of its “wokeness”? And Planned Parenthood (which gets federal dollars): will it now be defended (as it richly deserves)?

It also came down to masculinity: many Catholics yearn for a stronger male presence in a culture that has become overly feminized.

Catholics make up a quarter of the electorate. According to exit polling, Catholic voters in Pennsylvania favored Trump by a 13-point margin of 56 to 43 percent.

It was no landslide, the final overall 1.6 percent tally. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s won by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points, and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2.

By those standards, no, not a landslide.

But an earthquake, a largely Catholic one, no less.