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

With final votes still being tallied, it appears that Donald J. Trump beat Kamala Harris by about 1.6 percentage points, or 2.5 million votes. The winner received 49.8 percent of the vote.

But consider, by our estimate, that 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 the President-elect than in 2020.

That’s more–three million–than Trump’s 2.5 million margin of victory, such that Catholics can argue that they won the election for him.

It was the mouse–Catholics–who roared, setting aside certain misgivings.

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 opponent Harris’s promises to make Catholic hospitals perform abortions, her constant vow for terminations of pregnancies right up to birth, and the “identity” (transgender, binary, non-binary, multiple-genders) issue. 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 (call this the tissue issue) “in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district.”

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

But the big factor was and is general spirituality. There is now the chance that school prayer will be reinstituted, the Ten Commandments now publicly displayed (at least more than presently), and Catholics granted 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) be defunded (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 and no longer resembles the strength of the Bible.

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

It was no landslide, the final overall 1.6 percent tally in national popular ballots: In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson 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 no less, and a largely Catholic one.