Apparently only one man has skipped the dinner in the modern era, and that man wound up losing 49 states. (Walter Mondale, of course.)

Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?

That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn's column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer's bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer's blasphemy?

McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:

As California's attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was "proud" to have co-sponsored California's Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.

But perhaps Ms. Harris's most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men's fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.

She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday's Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.

Those are the direct issues, and those aren't limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn't include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.

That's one problem, but that's not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn't entirely religious:

Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. ...

Politico reports that Ms. Harris's prospects are "considerably dicier" because of a "cultural dissonance" between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.

And for some bizarre reason, Kamala decided to blow off the Catholics. After insulting Italian hero Columbus on Columbus Day.

End Wokeness
@EndWokeness

Catholics in swing states:

NV: 800,000
AZ: 1.1 million
WI: 1.5 million
GA: 1.2 million
NC: 1.8 million
MI: 2.3 million
PA: 5.1 million

Kamala will regret snubbing the Al Smith Dinner and Columbus Day

Vodkapundit has more on that.

Here are some clips: