Biden hopes to peel believers away from Trump
WILMINGTON: A rosary around his wrist, Joe Biden often speaks of the great comfort his Catholic faith has brought him in overcoming the tragedies that have deeply marked his life. When Americans vote on November 3, the Democratic presidential candidate hopes he will have persuaded enough of his fellow Catholics to back him; a majority of them supported Donald Trump in 2016.
Every Sunday, or nearly so, the former vice president attends Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine, a small, quaint church in an affluent suburb of Wilmington, Delaware. It is there, in the church’s vast and verdant cemetery, that lie the graves of his parents; his son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015; and of his first wife Neilia and their daughter Naomi, who were killed in a 1972 traffic accident as Neilia drove her three children to buy a Christmas tree. Beau and his brother Hunter survived the crash.
On Sunday morning, under the bright red fall foliage of a few scattered trees, Biden and wife Jill again visited the grave-decorated with small American flags-of Beau, a former Delaware attorney general.
Barack Obama’s vice president carried around his
wrist the rosary that his son was wearing the day he died; Biden said in 2017 that he had not removed it since Beau passed. The product of Catholic schools, Biden lives his religion openly, on a daily basis, and always has.
If he defeats Donald Trump in the November 3 election, he will become only America’s second Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy. From quoting Pope John Paul II on the campaign trail to frequently invoking his Irish Catholic roots, the 77-year-old Biden is determined not to cede the terrain of religion to Republicans.
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The stakes are high: Trump carried the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton thanks to razor-thin victories in several key battleground states. Every vote will count on Election Day. And Catholic voters offer Biden a rare opportunity to appeal to the “swing voters” who often switch parties from one election to the next. In 2016, 52 percent of Catholics supported Trump, to 45 percent for Clinton, according to the Pew Research Center.
With Catholics representing some one-fifth of the American populace, that gap is not insignificant. Yet American Catholics are far from a homogenous group: six in 10 white Catholics backed Trump in 2016, while nearly seven in 10 Hispanic Catholics voted for Clinton. And many key members of the Trump administration are Catholic. “We see the Catholic vote across the board to be a critical constituency to this campaign,” Josh Dickson, the faith engagement director for the Biden campaign, told AFP. —AFP