Overlooked Debate Moment: Vance Sets Fuse to Anti-Catholic Bigotry Issue | @amacforamerica

In an obviously planned and shrewd political maneuver in front of a national primetime audience of more than 43 million, Vance was capping off a series of events from the prior week such as the startling news that Harris would not attend the legendary Al Smith charity dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of New York (which led to talk of a staff shakeup over the campaign s blunder), social media posts from Donald Trump detailing several anti-Catholic allegations against Harris, a widely-viewed interview in which House Speaker Newt Gingrich charged that Harris is the most anti-Catholic presidential candidate in 150 years, and a TV ad shown in five crucial Senate races that actually takes two minutes of airtime to catalogue a series of moves by Senate Democrat candidates against Catholics.

The explosiveness of the issue although it has never been understood by the GOP consultant class is obvious enough from a mere look at the number of Catholics in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, a state whose city of Savannah has the largest St. Patrick s Day parade nationally outside of New York and Chicago, and that is not to mention the size of the Hispanic population in those states, more than one million in Pennsylvania and Georgia, 550,000 in Michigan, 430,000 in Wisconsin, and 2.3 million in Arizona.

The play here is starkly obvious. Many Hispanics, who are devout churchgoers, are also voters, but are unaware of the Democrat Party s record on anti-Catholicism. For that reason, for example, the Super PAC ad against Democrat Senate candidates played a Spanish language version on Latino television in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Even more pointedly, the ads mention at the end how Hispanics have a strong recollection of the persecution of the church by socialist governments. Latino American families remember Latino Americans remember how evil governments in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela hated the Church and Catholics, and how they persecuted priests, nuns, and laypeople, the ad states. Latino Americans know from history that this must not happen here in America.

via amac.us

This seems right to me.